Going to the Videotape

Michelle Malkin and Hot Air have the video up of their tracking down the veracity of the Jamil Hussein story.

FOB Justice says that the whole incident was blown out of proportion and no one was killed in the incidents where the mosques were attacked. However, none were destroyed. FOB Justice also notes the way that the rumors are taken at face value on the Baghdad streets. The Six Burning story doesn't hold up, and if hundreds of stories are run by AP daily, how many of them are also run based on rumor, and not the facts as they actually happened.

The AP's credibility and accountability for its news gathering continues to be in question. Yet, they appear completely incapable of admitting that they were duped or chose to be led down this path by Jamil Hussein or other stringers whose biases and intentions are to use the media for insurgent propaganda.

UPDATE:
Instapundit thinks that this latest video and other reporting on the inaccuracies and other errors in reporting based on Jamil Hussein as a source will somehow embarass the AP. I doubt it. They're beyond embarassment at this point. They've got a worldview to maintain, facts be damned. After all, that has been the ongoing position of Kathleen Carroll, who oversees the editorial staff at AP. She refuses to admit that the AP might have been wrong or used by their source. She refuses to accept that the critics are right on the Jamil Hussein burning six story or that they call into question the other reports using Hussein as a source (60+).

Instead, she cloaks any potential problems with the reporting in the fact that the AP produces hundreds of stories on Iraq daily. That's an excuse and a strawman that doesn't deal with the veracity of any of the news produced by the AP. If the AP is running hundreds of stories, are they all equally vetted as the Jamil Hussein work? Have they all been corroborated in the same manner? Many, indeed most appear to have been corroborated by other wire services, the MNF-I or Iraqi government - but what about those that haven't? How many other stories have gone under the radar that relate events or incidents that haven't been corroborated by other wire services or have been contradicted by other reports? Where are the corrections?

The AP position on corrections in the Jamil Hussein story has been one of stealth - correcting the record without making official corrections, which is part of their actual AP guidelines.

When we're wrong, we must say so as soon as possible. When we make a correction in the current cycle, we point out the error and its fix in the editor's note. A correction must always be labeled a correction in the editor's note. We do not use euphemisms such as "recasts," "fixes," "clarifies" or "changes" when correcting a factual error.

A corrective corrects a mistake from a previous cycle. The AP asks papers or broadcasters that used the erroneous information to use the corrective, too.

For corrections on live, online stories, we overwrite the previous version. We send separate corrective stories online as warranted.

The AP is supposed to avoid appareances of improprieties and avoid situations that might compromise the news gathering abilities. Yet, they appear to have violated this as well, using the pseudonym Jamil Hussein without stating it as such - causing quite a few people to chase ghosts, which, if the AP had been honest about the name of their source, would have cleared up questions about whether the person known as Jamil Hussein existed and we could move on to questioning about the veracity of his accounts.

That means we abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions. It means we will not knowingly introduce false information into material intended for publication or broadcast; nor will we alter photo or image content. Quotations must be accurate, and precise.

They will not knowingly introduce false information - starting with the use of the pseudonym, the reports relied upon false and misleading information that could not be verified by other sources. When confronted with this, the AP stonewalled for weeks on end and stood by the original stories claiming that the mosques were destroyed. The visual evidence directly contradicts this. Had the AP even bothered to send a reporter to the scene of the supposed mosques destroyed, they would have noted their continued existence and use. They would have tracked down the incident reports and found that those too contradicted Hussein's statements.

That they did nothing of the sort suggests that the AP's Iraq bureau needs to reacquaint itself with the AP Code of Conduct - and that serious organizational changes need to be made. Considering that Carroll has also engaged in the stonewalling, she too needs to become reacquainted with the Code of Conduct.

After all, there are more than 8,000 media outlets relying upon the AP to provide them with wire reports from around the world, and if they cannot produce accurate news, then the end-users suffer.

The problems, of course, are that: (1) the end users (the media outlets that run AP) don't have the resources to fact-check stories from all over the world given that many major outlets like the WaPo and NYT are cutting back on their foreign bureaus; and (2) the stories confirm and hew to the institutional biases of the editorial staff at the media outlets. This does a grave disservice to all who rely upon the media for their news.

UPDATE:
Confederate Yankee weighs in, revisiting the original AP stories and their mention of torched mosques and immolated bodies.