This is a lovely story. It has all the basic elements: real news reporting, hysterical fascist mau-mauing a news organization for doing its job, blatant attempts to manage the news and news reporting agencies, and thereby "tame" them, the hubris of an allegedly impartial blogger and a pending train wreck.
Briefly, remember the story about six Sunni worshippers dragged out of a mosque at gunpoint by Shiite gunmen and then doused with kerosene and burned to death?
Some fascist bloggers, led by Michelle Malkin, the legend immigrant, Powerline, three of the five worst lawyers in the world, and Glenn Reynolds, who reportedly teaches law in Tennessee, have challenged the story, claiming that a witness to the attack that was quoted by the AP doesn’t exist. It’s worth reading the USAToday story to get a feeling for how CENTCOM is so involved in media manipulation and how quickly the paid lapdogs of the rightie media attack machine will jump into a story in order to maintain the fiction that all is well, and look how many schools are being painted.
Now someone googled the name of the witness, an Iraqi police captain, and found numerous news stories citing him as a real human being, some stories pre-dating the mosque story. (You have to scroll down to the second or third page of the Google site, past all the self-aggrandizing winger cittions.) That would infer that if the man is an invented witness, as Malkin and the other winger fabulists maintain, someone went to a lot of effort to create what is known in the intelligence business as a ‘legend’ – a cover identity.
Eason Jordan, who was once a news manager with CNN, got hounded out of his job by these same barking lapdogs after he made a public speechtalking about the many, many journalists who have been killed by the Coalition forces in Iraq, several times under very puzzling circumstances.
The resultant furor (How dare he tell the truth that many journalists have been killed by US and coalition forces while thy were reporting the news?) became a case that terrified may in the news media (as it was intended to) and ranks with the "phony documents" fed to CBS news about Mr Bu$h’s desertion from the Texas and/or Alabama Air National Guard. There is nothing like reporting a real news story and then being vilified for telling the truth to make you afraid to speak truth to power a second time.
Eric Boehlart has a good recap of the story here.
Eason Jordan now operates a blog, IraqSlogger, which is established to try to be an inclusive website collating and discussing news from Iraq. It’s not a bad site, and we certainly wish him well with this endeavor. Our only concern is that he should be truthful, and support the basic tenets of journalism, which is something the wingers do not want to happen, of course. In response to Michelle Malkin’s barking shih tzu attack (well, we did call her a lapdog) on the mosque immolation story Mr Jordan has offered to pay her airfare to Iraq so that she can investigate the story herself.
Mrs Malkin, sensing a new chance to catapult herself into the legendary Big Time, has apparently accepted Mr Jordan’s offer to go to Iraq in order to search out the Capt Jamil Hussein, fugitive witness. (No links to wingers – find it yourself.) This is her Big Chance, a swing at the golden ring. Fame, fortune and respectability will be hers if she proves Jamil Hussein is a legend and not a real human being. Why, she might even end up on Meet The Press being interviewed by Little Timm!!
Here at Main and Central we support honest reputable journalism, and so we wish Mrs Malkin the best of luck in her endeavors. And we certainly hope she doesn’t fall prey to a Coalition accident. As for getting a chance to interview some masked members of the Mahdi Army, or some of the Sunni dead enders/insurgents/resistance – she’s on her own.
UPDATE: Apparently there is another winger, a man named "Curt" of the fascist blog Flying Aces who also wants to go to Iraq and find the truth
Further Update: Mr Curt’s fascist blog is named Flopping Aces and not Flying Aces as stated above. We deeply regret the error of misnaming his little corner of an alternate universe, and are relieved to learn Mr Curt’s aces flop, rather than fly.