I’ve been following the issues of the ‘truthiness’ of Iraq reporting with some interest, both at Patterico‘s blog and then at Flopping Aces, who has been pushing the story hard that the AP has been dealing with Iraqi sock puppets as sources.
The AP just doubled down with a new story:
The Iraqi Defense Ministry later said that al-Hashimi, the Sunni elder in Hurriyah, had recanted his account of the attack after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.
The dispute comes at a time when the military is taking a more active role in dealing with the media.
The AP reported on Sept. 26 that a Washington-based firm, the Lincoln Group, had won a two-year contract to monitor reporting on the Iraq conflict in English-language and Arabic media outlets.
That contract succeeded one held by another Washington firm, The Rendon Group. Controversy had arisen around the Lincoln Group in 2005 when it was disclosed that it was part of a U.S. military operation to pay Iraqi newspapers to run positive stories about U.S. military activities.
Seeking further information about Friday’s attack, an AP reporter contacted Hussein for a third time about the incident to confirm there was no error. The captain has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions. The captain, who gave his full name as Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire.
On Tuesday, two AP reporters also went back to the Hurriyah neighborhood around the Mustafa mosque and found three witnesses who independently gave accounts of the attack. Others in the neighborhood said they were afraid to talk about what happened.
Yes it’s a sock puppet. OR Al Qaeda. Same diff. Of course the AP is lying. They’ve always lied.
They can’t rebut Centcom’s assertions that the guy is indeed an Al Qaeda propagandist. Just repeating his nonsense (don’t doubt lots of people get killed, just the specifics of this story).
Fake but accurate. That’s the media.
Media: “This guy says some bad stuff.”
Blogger: “Uh, this guy doesn’t seem to exist. The Iraqis and US military has no record of him, and he occasionally comments on events that are kinda far away from his supposed AO.”
Media: “Oh, he exists. Trust us. One of our guys has spoken to him.”
Blogger: “Who?
Media: “Oh, some guy.”
Oh man, we should trust them because they tell us they should. They produce zero evidence.
Who are these “two AP reporters” that found more accounts? Who checked them out?
All this report says is “Our stringers are telling the truth. And we know this because other stringers tell us the same thing.”
I guess the repeated mention of all these Lincoln, Rendon, et al…. psy op groups shouldn’t be cause for wonder.
Why shouldn’t we pay Iraqi newspapers to print our stuff?
It’s not like Iraq is Switzerland. Heck it’s not even Cambodia.
And at that, the death rate in Zimbabwe is higher than Iraq. Zimbabwe would like to be Iraq.
But back on topic, you can’t dispute that this guy doesn’t seem to actually exist. Another “fake but accurate” moment.
talboito, you gotta a problem with friendly psyops?
I think talboito raises a good point. Why _does_ the article mention the contractors? Those three paragraphs aren’t relevant to the story, which is why the AP used a very loose segue: “…comes at a time when…”
It appears to be a _tu quoque_ fallacy by the AP, an attempt to justify bad practices by suggesting that other people also use bad practices.
The story is that the AP ran what appears to be false information, was called on it, and now is standing by its story. Yet it feels compelled to stick those three paragraphs in there, as if to say, “But we all know who the _real_ liars are. Not us poor journalists, but the military, which sometimes goes so far as to hire PR firms, the scoundrels.”
The attempt, then, is to justify getting your information from the enemy, on the grounds that your own government sometimes massages its message. While it’s true that the government does, that charge loses the distinction between military Information Operations — which is what these firms do — and Public Affairs. Anything the military passes to the AP comes out of the PA channel, not the IO channel, by law.
PAOs (that’s “Public Affairs Officers”) have always justified this practice of splitting up the two fields on the grounds that the military needs to enjoy the credibility that is supposed to come from the wall. The media is supposed to recognize that PA is giving it to them straight, while we reserve IO for foreign nations and populaces. Naturally, of course, the media cannot make such a distinction, so you get all the costs of the separation and none of the benefits.
We discussed this “at length at last year’s MilBlogger’s conference”:http://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_grimbeorn_archive.html#114591250747530869 on the sidelines. If you’re interested, it’s a long piece, with many useful comments as well.
I think the AP is implying that the pushback against the story may be directed by PR contractors.
I wish you guys would spend as much time thinking about how to salvage something—anything—from the IraqWagmire as you do groupthinking that it isn’t so bad as it looks. (The sort of “evidence” that is adduced in refutation: that the Iraqi source is not of a rank authorized to talk to the press—as opposed to leak!?—is pathetic.)
That is, Andrew, to make the point: the AP either doesn’t see or doesn’t understand the distinction between PA and IO. The “wall” has none of the benefits claimed for it.
One of the things to be salvaged from Iraq is the lessons on how to fight in the media space. The battle there is real, and indeed may be where this and near-future wars are finally decided. Thus, these questions are worth considering at length.
Once again we see that criticism of the news media for flogging faked stories or enemy propaganda as “news” is itself held up as a sign that any pro-Iraq operation story is invalid and any anti-Iraq operation story is golden.
Given that we have seen a long history of faked, exaggerated and biased stories from sources like AP, I find this defensive spin very indicative of those whose political agenda is being placed above the interests of our nation.
>>All this report says is “Our stringers are telling the truth. And we know this because other stringers tell us the same thing.”<< LOL. We don't even know that they're OTHER stringers. They could've just called the first set back to do "verifications." Oh, yeah, we told you the truth the first time. Hang on the line while we finish our tea and we'll tell the truth all over again, and supply some more unverifiable details!
Dang cutoffs. Should also read:
We don’t even know they used fresh stringers. They could’ve used the same set over again.
“Of course we told you the truth! Here, hang on the line while we finish our tea and we’ll give you some more unverifiable reassurances of our truthfullness!”
Andrew —
By way of Belmont Club:
“Catholic News Service on Zimbabwe”:http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0606719.htm
Around 3.500 die a week in Zimbabwe. Malnutrition, poverty, and AIDS. According Archbishop Ncube.
That is far higher by even the exaggerated media estimates than Iraq. It’s 182,000 per year. A thousand per week higher than Darfur. In October in Iraq 3,700 people died. A week’s toll in Zimbabwe.
Unless you want to go to Zimbabwe and tell the Archbishop he’s full of it, I suggest you embrace reality.
Iraq is not that bad. It’s better by a factor of four than Zimbabwe at worst, and likely substantially better. Considering death tolls.
The violence in Iraq is due to your pals the Iranians and Syrians. You know, the guys who assassinated Lebanese journalists, government officials, party leaders. I realize Dems get a warm glow whenever they contemplate brutal assassinations by anti-American dictators, but a little sanity would be welcome.
Repeat, by the standards of Zimbabwe, Iraq is not that bad. Far more manageable. No one is starving to death. Dying of AIDS in massive numbers. Kill the killers and the dying stops. It’s manageable.
If we don’t want to or can’t fund insurgencies inside Iran and Syria, simply bomb Iran’s oil facilities and their nuke facilities and sink their navy. Again. With a promise to repeat unless Iran knocks it off. Spread the pain. Repeat with Syria. Heck take out Assad and let the chips fall where they may.
Andrew’s problem is he pretends there’s some magical “stability” that will make all problems go away. Instead of running away America should embrace chaos and spread the pain throughout our enemies realms. Weaken Iran and Syria which are fragile police states dependent on payoffs. Freezing Iranians are likely to overthrow the Mullahs and make a deal with the US. Set the Lebanese against Hezbollah/Syria/Iranian imperialists and bomb the heck out of the Hezzies and Assad.
THAT’s the way to reducing the killing in Iraq.
Of course no journalist worth his anti-American pro-Jihad salt would print the actual facts. Such as Zimbabwe’s death toll being four times that of Iraq.
Yes the AP lies AL, and that truly diminishes your culpability in this mess.
I only have a bach in armchair psychology but it’s still obvious what your motivation is. It wouldn’t be offensive if your goal were to provide balance. But it is clear and has been clear since the beginning that the goal is to distort just as much as the AP does, just the other way.
One often reads that the US has to “get better” at using tools beyond the blunt instruments of the military. Soft power and all that. This is one thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on; the dispute at election time is over who can field the team that can better accomplish this agreed-on mission. (Bush is too unilateral, the Democrats are too squishy, etc.)
It’s nice to agree in principal, or to suppose that we all agree in principal, when vague notions are under discussion.
But it seems that in getting down to specifics, we always end up at a place like this. It turns out that the stories aren’t shaped by an agency of the US government, but by an autonomous Western company or agency like the AP. When the AP turns out to be (at best) indifferent to the truth or (at worst) spinning enemy propaganda, what exactly is the exercise of “soft power” on the part of the USG supposed to look like?
Does the entire domestic political spectrum urge CENTCOM PA officers to jump up and yell “bull!!” as loud as they can? Or is this government trying to mislead, being willing to interfere with the news media informing the citizenry?
Is the entire spectrum okay with jihadi propaganda being countered with US propaganda, which by definition must be done under cover–or, again, is this corrupt spinning by our government?
I’m not even suggesting that the military should be controlling the news flow–that’s a big topic. Just pointing out that our widespread agreement on concepts like “Soft Power” doesn’t really look like agreement at all, once we move from grand abstractions to specific cases.
Really, you guys ought to get some oxygen sometime. There’s no other explanation for repeating masturbatory fantasies like
Like, 52-pickup foreign policy has worked so well in Afghanistan (which we are rapidly botching) and Iraq.
Andrew:
Without getting into its soundness, the proposal you quote (“rubble don’t make trouble”) is qualitatively different than approach currently at work in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you wish to argue against it as a strategy, false analogies provide no proof.
SG,
The ineffectiveness of the strategy currently at work in Iraq is self-evident and surely requires no further proof. Violence and lawlessnes is not decreasing in Iraq (the goal) and the USA still has 150,000 troops there, who are, more or less, spinning their wheels. The debate about whether one particular incident is true or not, or whether the media reports too much bad or too little good news is irrelevent in light of the bigger picture that, however you want to describe it, things in Iraq are bad enough to require the presence of 150,000 US troops and there is an increase–not a decrease–in violence, notwithstanding the rather useless fact that more people die of Aids or poverty in other countries.
If things weren’t that bad–as some are suggesting–surely we would withdraw our troops. If the press is exagerating the situation, surely the commanders on the ground would know the true situation and would recommend a withdrawal of troops. It’s hard to imagine the president keeping 150,000 troops in Iraq based upon false press reports of the extent of the violence. I think we can only assume that a) things are pretty bad there; and b) things are not getting any better. If neither were true, we would see a corresponding decrease in the need for US troops.
Mark,
If the media are lying to the public by design or laziness, it is never irrelevant to point this out. Their currency is the story, information. That is their core public purpose and public claim. If they are not reliable or truthful, that is a relevant issue of the first order.
I understand that you’d like to give media a pass on the need for accuracy and truthfulness if they match your political agenda – hey, “socialist realism” has a long 20th century history – but that’s not how it works.
Joe,
I don’t see what from my post or my argument leads you to understand I wish to give the media a free pass on the need for accuracy and truthfulness. I am merely pointing out what seems to me to be the faulty reasoning of those who believe that the media are portaying conditions in Iraq as worse than they are. A conclusion that, to me, is belied by the fact of the necessity of keeping 150,000 troops there. I do suspect that the underlying rationale for their belief is actually the one you accuse me of possessing: that becasue media reports do not portray the situation as they would like it to be, i.e. things in Iraq are not so bad, then the media must not be telling the truth. I, however, am arguing the contrary position: that the general overall situation in Iraq is being portrayed reasonably accurately. This view is given independent corroboration by the US military, which deems it necessary to not withdraw troops. If things were not so bad, or if things were improving, I believe we would see a corresponding drawdown of US forces.
As you say, if the media are lying to the public, that is no small or irrelevant matter. However, the conclusion that they are doing so–in this particular instance–is not supported by the facts. A handful of occasions out of thousands does not make for a sound argument; it would be the same as if one were to describe the US forces as whole based upon the actions of a dozen bad apples. The truth is more likely to be, it seems to me, that things in Iraq are, in fact, quite hellish and that we are not gaining ground against the violent forces. I, like everyone else, would wish it to be otherwise but wishing does not make it so.