Allah at Hot Air has an excellent post discussing the latest in the Jamil-Jamail Hussein affair.
Evidently, Michelle Malkin has found out...something...about Hussein, but it is still unclear if anyone knows exactly who this man is. Allah thinks the man used a pseudonym, which is a violation of A.P. ethics (I know, oxymoron) without explanation.
But the better part of Allah's post is his dismantling of Eric Boehlert's silly piece slapping at warbloggers and their interest in the Jamil-Jamail Hussein story. Here's a bit from Boehlert's column:
The warbloggers’ strawman is built around the claim that if the AP hadn’t reported the Burned Alive story, which was no more than a few sentences within a larger here’s-the-carnage-from-Baghdad-today article [Actually, Allah notes that the burning bodies was the only element of the story when it first hitThe Drudge Report], then Americans would still gladly support the war in Iraq...
Chasing the Burned Alive story down a rabbit’s hole, giddy warbloggers deliberately ignore the hundreds of Iraqi civilians who are killed each week, the thousands who are injured, and the tens of thousands who try to flee the disintegrating country. None of that matters. Only Burned Alive matters, as if an AP retraction would change a thing on the ground in Baghdad, where electricity remains scarce, but sectarian death squads roam freely...
[D]espite the hundreds of stories AP files from Iraq each week, and the thousands posted annually since the invasion, warbloggers can only find fault with a single story, yet insist that one is enough to tarnish the AP’s Iraq reporting and all mainstream news reporting from Baghdad.
The disengenuousness of Boehlert's small, petty claim is palpable. He knows that there are more than 60 stories using Hussein as a source, according to Malkin. And if Boehlert worked anywhere other than his high school newspaper, he knows that the credibility of a news outlet is only as good as its sources. If the sources are suspect, so is the news agency that reports it.
So, it isn't like Boehlert is naive enough to honestly believe this is just about one story. He knows better.
Allah goes on to dismantle Boehlert's argument bit by bit:
He also knows that the AP originally claimed four mosques were burned and that that claim has since disappeared into the ether without so much as a clarification. Just like he also knows, courtesy of Robert Bateman, that it’s unlikely in the extreme based on Hussein’s location that he’d be a credible witness for the wide variety of attacks sourced to him by the AP. All of which make this story highly dubious, yet none of which Boehlert sees fit to mention anywhere in his piece. Why?
Because he doesn’t care if the story’s bogus or not. He’ll say en passant that he does because he knows, as a journalist and media critic, that he has to. But it’s strictly pro forma. His position seems to be that the story’s true in the Larger Sense, as a microcosm of the brutality in Iraq, even if it’s not, you know, technically true (”as if an AP retraction would change a thing on the ground in Baghdad, where electricity remains scarce, but sectarian death squads roam freely”). In other words, “fake but accurate.” That’s his bottom line here and that’s why it’s dishonest of him and his pals to even pretend to care whether the report’s accurate. As far as they’re concerned, if Jamil Hussein turns out to be real, the story’s true; if he turns out not to be real, the story’s True. They can’t go wrong. Meanwhile the AP, if it’s guilty of bad facts to whatever greater or lesser degree, gets an almost completely free pass.
At the risk of suggesting that I know What Warbloggers Believe better than Eric Boehlert does, let me assure you that we’re not using this story as a fig leaf for the war. There are Shiite death squads roaming hospitals in Iraq — just one of many “bona fide, grim realities on the ground,” as Michelle puts it, but gruesome enough in itself to convey the magnitude of the emergency. No one, or almost no one, is under any illusions about how awful conditions are and how Bush mismanaged the occupation when we had our best chance to get it right. On the contrary, it’s Boehlert who’s using the war as a fig leaf for yet another credible accusation of shoddy, possibly ideologically motivated war journalism. He’d have you believe that to challenge this report is, essentially, to be guilty of historical revisionism, which is not only ironic vis-a-vis the AP but a nifty way of cowing a critic into backing off. It’s more important that Michelle Malkin be wrong, you see, than knowing for sure whether the world’s biggest news agency is passing off crap stories about the most important issue of our time.
The problem Boehlert isn't willing to address is that this story is just the latest of example of journalistic malfeasance. How is anyone supposed to believe anything written by the Associated Press if they use bogus sources and don't correct their mistakes publicly and loudly? If the A.P., which used to have a valuable reputation for accuracy and honesty, can't be held accountable by supposed media watchdogs like Media Matters, then why should the average guy reading and/or watching the news trust them?
Instead of spending so much time trying to trash Michelle Malkin for asking the questions, Boehlert should spend his time figuring out why journalists are more interested in truthiness than truthfulness.
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