There has been quite a bit of debate in the blogosphere surrounding this story (note: link has been deactivated) of several days ago:

An Israeli air strike hit a Reuters vehicle in Gaza City on Saturday, wounding two journalists as they covered a military incursion, doctors and residents said.

One of the Palestinian journalists, who worked for a local media organization, was seriously wounded. A cameraman working for Reuters was knocked unconscious in the air strike, one of several in the area.

The Israeli army said the vehicle was hit because it was acting suspiciously in an area of combat and had not been identified as belonging to the media.

"During the operation, there was an aerial attack on a suspicious vehicle that drove in a suspicious manner right by the forces and in between the Palestinian militant posts," army spokeswoman Captain Noa Meir said.

"This car was not identified by the army as a press vehicle," she said. "If journalists were hurt, we regret it."

Despite the Israeli acknowledgement that they did fire on a "suspicious vehicle," bloggers were inherently suspicious of the story due to apparently staged and in some cases definitively falsified information provided by Arab news stringers and photojournalists in the recent Israeli-Hezbollah War. Some were quick to cast doubts on the veracity of the story.

Other bloggers, notably AllahPundit, Ace of Spades and Dan Riehl cautioned that we should resist jumping on the "Pallywood" bandwagon without having support for the claims being made.

I wanted support to prove or disprove these allegations, and so I went to the people who should know most about the kind of vehicles damaged in the attack, armored vehicle manufacturers themselves.

I sent an email to these five armored vehicle manufacturers, asking them to look at the photo (above) that seems to be the center of the debate, and asked them two questions:

1. Is this damage consistent with what you might expect from a 70MM rocket's warhead detonating roughly a foot above an civilian-manufactured armored vehicle such as the one pictured? If not, would you expect more damage, or less?
2. People suspicious of the attack are citing the obvious rust around the impact site on the vehicle as proof that these are old markings, while the expert claims that vehicles can rust in this kind of climate in the short time mentioned. Does that sound logical, or would alloys used in civilian armored vehicles take longer to show this level of rust? Would you provide an estimate of how long it would take?
   

Within an hour, I had responses from representatives of two armored vehicle manufacturing companies.

David Khazanski of Inkas Armored Vehicle Manufacturing responded first, stating:

Looking at the picture received through the link on your email, the damage on the vehicle was sustained very long time ago and probably not by the rocket, or it was already tempered [sic] with[.]

In no uncertain terms, Mr. Khazankski doubts that the vehicle was damaged recently, or by rocket fire, and suggests that the vehicle may have been tampered with.

Chris Badsey, chairman and CEO of First Defense International Group, which has armored vehicles deployed in the Middle East and has professional knowledge of Israeli weaponry, graciously offered up a very detailed analysis of the vehicle in the photo above (minor spelling errors corrected):

1.) Firstly as an armouring company we are familiar with all weapons, weapons damage, collateral damage and the destruction of armoured vehicles from blasts and various types of rockets and ammunition.


2.) Secondly we are familiar with the Israeli weapons of choice and uses in the field as we continue to work with them and have a manufacturing relationship with them both in Israel and Iraq.


3.) Whether the Reuters vehicle was attacked by who I could not verify but In my expert opinion the damage, the hole is NOT consistent of a Hellfire Missile or a 70mm rocket nor any armoured piercing bullet/trajectory.


4.) The Reuters armoured van would only be armoured to threat level IV which would consist of 8mm of High Hard 4140 Steel armouring on the roof which you can see in the picture as peeled open somewhat. The damage to the roof looks to me very consistent with possible shrapnel penetration from an object other than a rocket or missile itself.


5.) Furthermore the armored glass would be 62mm for threat level IV protection against blasts and armour piercing rounds. The damage to the back window is certainly NOT consistent with any missile, bomb, rocket blast that would have occurred on impact if a rocket was fired around and directly at the vehicle.

Mr. Badsey went on to bring up a point that few of us seemed to have considered, and that is the primary blast effect involved in any explosive projectile used against an armored vehicle.

There are essential four kinds of blast effects (mechanisms) related to the detonation of any explosive device on the human body, and the first three carry over to the kind of damage we should expect warheads to have on vehicles.

They are:

• primary: Unique to high-order explosives; results from the impact of the overpressurization wave with body surfaces ;
• secondary: Results from flying debris and bomb fragments;
• tertiary: Results when bodies
  are thrown by blast wind;
• quaternary: All explosion-related injuries, illnesses, or diseases not due to primary, secondary, or tertiary mechanisms; includes exacerbation or complications of existing conditions

The vehicle in the picture above shows only very minor damage that some allege are consistent with the secondary, or shrapnel effect of a warhead detonating in close proximity. But a vehicle either hit by or suffering a near miss from a helicopter warhead would also sustain major primary blast damage, as shown below.

The photo above is of one of First Defense International Group's armored Ford Expeditions which was heavily damaged by an IED blast near Baghdad, Iraq. Note how the vehicle has been heavily dented by the blast. Teh hood is crumpled and the bumbers are destroyed. All bulletproof windows have been heavily damaged, with the left rear glass completely imploded (to FDI's credit, there were no casualties).

The Reuter's vehicle, however seems to show far less damage than one may expect. The sheet metal is not damaged, and the spider-webbing of the windshield would seem to be the only damage to the vehicle's glass. If a warhead detonated on or within feet of this vehicle as seems to be the claim, Mr. Badsey would have expected far more damage, what one word did he use to describe what we should see of this vehicle?

"Pieces."

It was preceded by the words, "nothing left but."

I then forwarded this link to Mr. Badsey, and asked him if what he saw was consistent with the kind of damage he might expect from a 70MM rocket explosion above the vehicle as an intelligence expert opined to Allah at Hotair.com.

He responded:

There is clearly no blast damage internally and only from some object inconsistent with any rocket or missile attack. I'm unable to see any burn or secondary explosion or markings from the picture so apologize for not been 100% able to see from this picture.

A 70mm rocket has certain features and destructive mechanisms that are not consistent in either pictures especially on entry and internal damage from what you have shown me.

The inside is too intact including the upholstery for this type of ammunition detonation on impact. It looks as if the armor was penetrated by probably flying shrapnel. Not consistent with missiles or rockets of any kind

And so here we stand, weighing conflicting stories.

Reuters says they were fired upon, and Israel agrees that they fired at a suspicious vehicle, but two armored vehicle experts state that the damage to this Reuters vehicle is not even close to being consistent with what they would expect from Israeli rockets or missiles. The first expert, Mr. Khazanski, indicated that he thinks the damage on the roof was sustained a "long time ago."

From what these experts tell me, it does not appear that the vehicle Reuters claimed was hit was hit by either a rocket or a missile, that the damage appears to be from some time prior to the attack, but that the damage may be consistent with shrapnel from something else.

Something damaged this Reuters armored vehicle, but when and how seems to be very much in doubt.

Update: Allah has another photo... no rust. that would possibly rule out the the damage being old, but what precisely hit the vehicle is still up in the air.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:22 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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Will Thoretz is the company spokesman for VNU Media, the company that owns Editor & Publisher and employs Editor Greg Mitchell, a man that has something of a "truth problem" according to Michael Silence, and seems to be on the wrong side of an example of "journalistic malpractice" according to Stephen Spruiell.

Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall.com attempted to contact Mitchell at Editor & Publisher for comment several times yesterday, but Mitchell has thus far decline to respond. Ham also tried to contact Will Thoretz of Editor & Publisher's parent company, VNU Media, and while she was able to speak to his assistant, Thoretz has not responded to Ham to date.

Color me skeptical, but evidence indicating that one of your editors has severe ethical issues should demand an immediate response of some sort, unless, of course, the decision has been made to stonewall the story and hope it goes away.

Hopeing that this would not turn out to be the case, I sent the following email to Mr. Thoretz moments ago, hoping to spur him to action:

Dear Will Thoretz,

My name is Bob Owens, and I am the blogger that noticed Greg Mitchell's 2003 editorial admitting that he manufactured elements of a story as a young reporter, was suddenly changed within hours of my having linked it. I also know that you have been contacted by Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall.com regarding the unacknowledged and unethical rewrite of the 2003 column, a rewrite apparently designed to cast Mr. Mitchell in a more favorable light.

I have also noticed that while the article now features a correction to the timeline elements that Mitchell got wrong, it still includes elements of the rewrite (specifically the new addition of the phrase "as a summer intern" which did not exist before 4:00 PM Friday, Aug 26).

I would like to ask why this article has not been restored to the 2003 form in which it has existed for over three years until an unfavorable light was cast on Mitchell's admitted journalistic fraud, and why these changed elements are allowed to still exist without an acknowledgement that such changes took place.

The self-serving rewrite of Mr. Mitchell's column has been described as "journalistic malpractice," and I think the public has a right to know how this happened, who was responsible, and what policies will be put in place by VNU Media to keep such incidents from occurring in the future.

To date, I have noticed that Mr. Mitchell seems to be ducking phone calls from Ms. Ham, and you have not (to the best of my knowledge) responded to her either. I certainly hope that an effort to "stonewall" this issue is not underway, as that would be quite counterproductive to all concerned.

All it takes is a simple look to the server logs to conclusively identify who rewrote Mitchell's 2003 column late this past Friday afternoon. An even application of the kind of company policies I expect in any large media organization against this kind of unethical behavior should provide the remedy.

Please let me know what steps VNU Media intends to take to resolve this matter.

Thank you very much for your time.

Respectfully,

I certainly hope Mr. Thoretz and VNU Media will choose to publicly respond to this issue sooner rather than later. By now, they should know that the longer things linger the more time people have to dig, and the worse things get, day by day.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:02 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This past Friday afternoon, an unscrupulous revision to a forgotten three year-old editorial by Greg Mitchell became the bomb that threatens to blow apart Editor & Publisher, a media industry trade publication, and it's parent company, VNU Media.

Mitchell wrote a two part editorial last week, "In Defense of War Photographers," attacking bloggers for exposing Reuters news photographers as the author of two faked photos, and calling into question other events bloggers felt were possibly staged.

I hypothesized on Friday that Mitchell's stirring defense of the suspected fakers might have arisen from his own past as someone who has admitted staging the news in a 2003 editorial.

The story should have died right there, but then, in a surprisingly stupid and petty act, someone with access to Mitchell's editorial decided to change the lede of the editorial to paint Mitchell in a more favorable light. Someone at Editor & Publisher was rewriting history within hours of unwanted attention cast upon the editorial by a handful of blogs.

Suddenly, the sleepy little editorial that had lain dormant for three years had detonated into charges of "journalistic malpractice" and calls for Mitchell to resign. Surely, someone who represents an industry trade publication as its editor must be held to the same standards as other journalists, if not higher standards.

And so while other fact errors in Mitchell's editorial have been addressed, Editor & Publisher pointedly refuse to even mention the blatant rewrite of the column's lede that suddenly brought this sleepy editorial back to the nation's attention.

Editor & Publisher and Greg Mitchell could easily defuse an increasingly volatile situation by simply admitting that Mitchell "tweaked" the article because he wanted to write off his fraud as a youthful indiscretion, but instead of taking a small bite of well-deserved crow, it seems Editor & Publisher and their parent company, VNU Media, may attempt instead to act as if nothing ever happened, and hope that the storm will pass without them having to admit their ever-compounding errors in judgement.

Mary Katharine Ham is trying to reach Mitchell at Editor and Publisher for comment, but so far has had no luck. I think she should try Will Thoretz, VNU's company spokesman instead. It seems that sooner rather than later that this particular ball will be in his court as Mitchell continues to hope that his fradulent past and present won't catch up to him.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:33 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Mary Katharine Ham has a new column up at Townhall.com discussing the "Fauxtography" scandals and the journalistic malpractice in Greg Mitchell's 2003 column that I highlighted over the weekend.

I should hope that Editor & Publisher's parent company VNU Media follows David Perlmutter's suggested option on how to handle similar scandals:

News picture-making media organizations have two paths of possible response to this unnerving new situation. First, they can stonewall, deny, delete, dismiss, counter-slur, or ignore the problem. To some extent, this is what is happening now and, ethical consideration aside, such a strategy is the practical equivalent of taking extra photos of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The second, much more painful option, is to implement your ideals, the ones we still teach in journalism school. Admit mistakes right away. Correct them with as much fanfare and surface area as you devoted to the original image. Create task forces and investigating panels. Don't delete archives but publish them along with detailed descriptions of what went wrong. Attend to your critics and diversify the sources of imagery, or better yet be brave enough to refuse to show any images of scenes in which you are being told what to show. I would even love to see special inserts or mini-documentaries on how to spot photo bias or photo fakery—in other words, be as transparent, unarrogant, and responsive as you expect those you cover to be.

The stakes are high. Democracy is based on the premise that it is acceptable for people to believe that some politicians or news media are lying to them; democracy collapses when the public believes that everybody in government and the press is lying to them.

While Perlmutter was specifically talking about photojournalism, the same principles apply to print journalism as well. VNU Media would be wise to opt for a transparent investigation.

We should know just how seriously they value their credibility by their action or inaction later today.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:40 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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A bit of three years after-the-fact editing in a 2003 Greg Mitchell editorial at Editor & Publisher got quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere yesterday.

For those you now just coming to this story, Mitchell wrote a May, 20, 2003 article in which he admitted to faking a news story as a young reporter. Jon Ham tipped me off to the existence of the article, which led me to write this post opining that perhaps Mitchell wrote his sympathetic and spirited defenses of photojournalists accused of staging photographs precisely because he, too, had an admitted history as a fraudulent journalist.

My post, complete with a link to Mitchell's 2003 editorial, went "live" early Friday afternoon, complete with quotes pulled from Mitchell's article.

Many blogs linked the story quickly starting at 1:56 PM, and by 4:00 PM, no fewer than five other blogs had copied sections of text, including the opening paragraph. By 5:00 PM, in the course of an hour, the long-dormant story reappeared, rewritten to emphasize Mitchell's youth and inexperience.

As Mary Katharine Ham noted:

This is just so phenomenally stupid. CY rounded up all the blogs that excerpted the original article, and he has the link to the original article from the Wayback Machine. It's all there, for everyone to see. All of the incredible dishonesty. If it was pathetic to fake a story about tourists at Niagara, it's downright embarrassing to alter the confession after a couple people bring attention to it.

Stephen Spriuell, writing at National Review Online's Media Blog, says this represents journalistic malpractice, and if true, calls Mitchell's professional ethics into question.

And so as the work week begins again tomorrow, I suspect we're going to learn some lessons not only about Mitchell, but about the company Mitchell works for, VNU Business Media, and it's President and CEO, Michael Marchesano. Marchesano's site states that, "VNU Business Media takes pride in being one of the most prestigious and respected business information companies in the world."

I have no reason to doubt that, and at this point on a Sunday morning, would be quite surprised if Mr. Marchesano even knew about the potential damage to his company's reputation committed by "someone" trying to mitigate the damage to the reputation of someone who is already a self-admitted fraud.

VNU Business Media claims "45 market-leading trade magazines, 17 directories, 70 events and conferences, 65 trade shows and 165 eMedia products." We will learn tomorrow how willing they are to defend their credibility, and how transparently they choose to respond to what is a flagrant and well-documented cases of dishonesty by someone on their editorial staff. This case is easily proven by an internal audit showing precisely who updated the May 20, 2003 article between 4:00PM and 5:00 PM (Eastern) this past Friday afternoon.

The actual investigation should take less than an hour, but how VNU Business Media, Editor & Publisher, and Greg Mitchell choose to respond may affect them all for a long time to come.

Update: It might not be VNU Business Media that looks into Mitchell's apparent transgressions, but VNU eMedia, who can be contacted here. If you choose to write VNU, please respectfully ask for a review of the changes to the article, and explain who you think it warrants a review.

Update: Dan Riehl establishes that Mitchell seems to have lied about other elements of this story as well. Riehl argues Mitchell was neither nineteen, nor an intern, but 21-year-old professional journalist when he committed his first journalistic fraud. It seems Greg Mitchell has a pattern of behavior that should call his entire body of work into question.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:40 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Acting on a tip yesterday from Jon Ham, I wrote this post, ripping into Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell for his guilty history of staging the news.

The story was quickly picked up in the blogosphere, including NRO's Media Blog, Instapundit, and Ace of Spades HQ.

The "meat" of the story was Greg Mitchell's 2003 admission that he had faked a minor news story in his past, and this "re-broke" after Mitchell had just written a pair of columns blasting bloggers for questioning the apparent staging and faking of news stories by the media in the recent Israeli-Hezbollah war. The article read:

Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

I never found out. Oh, I went down to the falls, all right, but when I got there, I discovered that I just could not wander up to strangers (even dorky ones wearing funny hats and knee socks) and ask them for their personal opinions, however innocuous. It was a puffball assignment, but that wasn't why I rebelled. I just could not bring myself to do it.

So I sat on a park bench and scribbled out a few fake notes and then went back to the office and wrote my fake story, no doubt quoting someone like Jane Smith from Seattle, honeymooning with her husband Oscar, saying something like, "Gosh, I never knew there was so much rock under there!"

Of course, I got away with it.

That was exactly the text of this article when I, Mary Katharine Ham of Townhall.com, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, Mike of Cold Fury, and Suitably Flip cited the text of the article this afternoon.

And yet now, things have mysteriously changed within the article.

As cited by the six blogs listed in the proceeding paragraph, the opening lines of the article began:

Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally “turned off” the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

By 5:01 PM Eastern time, someone pasting at CY under the name Barfly, in a comment defending Mitchell, noted:

"Back when I was 19 and worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette) as a summer intern[ . . .]"

I think its hilarious how you take Greg to task - and do it in such a dishonest way! Why did you omit the part about his being an intern at the time? Did it interfere with your narrative?. . .

And Barfly was correct: the narrative had changed. It had changed to this:

Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back in 1967, when I was 19 and worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette) as a summer intern, our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

Not sure what changed? Let's show the newly added words in bold just to make it a bit more obvious:

Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back in 1967, when I was 19 and worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette) as a summer intern, our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

Someone substantially altered the text of the mediainfo.com story, after six different bloggers cited the article. If you type in the URL of http://www.mediainfo.com/ and press "enter" so that you could investigate who mediainfo.com belongs to, wondering how they could change such an old story so quickly, the URL will resolve to adweek.com.

Adweek is owned by VNU Business Media, the same company that runs media web sites BrandWeek, MediaWeek and--you guessed it--Editor & Publisher, where Greg Mitchell is the editor on the hotseat.

It is readily apparent that someone at Editor and Publisher has been manipulating the news a lot more recently than 1967, and if I was a corporate officer at VNU Business Media, I think I'd start my Monday morning by asking who has access rights to post and repost stories, and I'd make a thorough investigation of the server logs to see who uploaded the changes to that article Friday afternoon, sometime between 2:30 PM and 5:01 PM. I'd ask, because that someone is torpedoing my company's credibility.

When they talk to "that person," I hope they remind him that 1967 is long past, but character flaws are forever.

Update: Ed Driscoll notes that the original, unaltered article exists on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:19 AM | Comments (84) | Add Comment
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1 Well, this is something of a bombshell. Obviously it suggests the intellectual dishonesty Greg Mitchell engaged in as a “19-year-old intern” (or staff reporter or whatever) is still very much apart of his journalistic persona. What’s especially ironic is that E&P presents itself as being the conscious and “watchdog” of the journalistic trade or “profession.” Yet here’s an apparent example of E&P going into archival materials and making changes – without notifying readers. If true, it’s going to be fascinating to see how this plays out. Incidentally, when E&P was covering the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia, I noticed an online discussion (I don’t remember where) between journalists about how the wording in E&P’s hard-hitting stories criticizing the media’s coverage had mysteriously changed during the day. And these changes, to be sure, apparently went beyond typos, misspellings, and that sort of thing. E&P allegedly tweaked substantive parts of its articles -- just like it’s apparently done with archival material -- rather than notifying readers of clarifications or corrections. To be sure, I don’t know if my anecdote involving E&P’s mine coverage is accurate. But it certainly is consistent with what’s being described in respect to the mysterious changes in Mitchell’s retrospective piece. Finally, as I noted in an earlier comment, even if Mitchell was only an intern, it’s highly probable he had enough journalism experience and training to know that what he was doing was wrong. There’s a final irony here. Like many senior editors in the MSM, Mitchell came of age during the Watergate and Vietnam War eras. That’s when the word “cover-up,” among other things, became part of the journalistic lexicon. And those engaging in cover-ups of any kind -- according to the journalistic culture that sprang from that era -- were given no quarter. Now that E&P is engaging in an apparent cover-up, let’s see how much slack Mitchell’s MSM pals give him.

Posted by: dpaulin at August 26, 2006 02:47 AM (AN+Gn)

2 It takes forever to load, but as of the time of this post, the original version of Mitchell's article is still in The Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Posted by: Ed Driscoll at August 26, 2006 03:07 AM (thF07)

3 Someone substantially altered the text of the mediainfo.com story, after six different bloggers cited the article. If you type in the URL of http://www.mediainfo.com/ and press "enter" so that you could investigate who mediainfo.com belongs to, wondering how they could change such an old story so quickly, the URL will resolve to adweek.com. It is readily apparent that someone at Editor and Publisher has been manipulating the news a lot more recently than 1967, and if I was a corporate officer at VNU Business Media, I think I'd start my Monday morning by asking who has access rights to post and repost stories, and I'd make a thorough investigation of the server logs to see who uploaded the changes to that article Friday afternoon, sometime between 2:30 PM and 5:01 PM. IÂ’d ask, because that someone is torpedoing my companyÂ’s credibility. When they talk to "that person," I hope they remind him that 1967 is long past, but character flaws are forever." Posted by Confederate Yankee at August 26, 2006 01:19 AM | TrackBack So you have no proof of this "change", correct? And we're supposed to just trust that you wingers aren't covering for each other? Here's an alternate theory: one blogger (perhaps "Jon Ham") altered the text for partisan reasons, and sent it out, and you guys ran with it. When I pointed out the discrepancy, you went into CYA mode. Since I caught the change, and not you, I could just as easily ascribe this "change" to you, as you did to someone at E&P as you have no proof. The alternative is to take you guys at your word, without proof. This stinks like a "family" cover-up, and I don't mean Greg Sargent and E&P. Why would he include the info, after leaving it out? What purpose would it serve? But you, your motives are crystal, buddy.

Posted by: Barfly at August 26, 2006 03:16 AM (LaWWK)

4 Barfly, The original is still archived and online.

Posted by: Ed Driscoll at August 26, 2006 03:26 AM (thF07)

5 Mayhap it's time for Greg Mitchell to be exiled to the Island of Misfit Journalists along with Mary Mapes, Dan Rather, Jayson Blair, and a good chunk of Reuters' photo stringers. There's a certain principle in law enforcement that says for evey time someone is caught doing something wrong, there were probably ten times they were not caught. Character matters quite a lot in a business based so much on trust.

Posted by: TallDave at August 26, 2006 07:11 AM (H8Wgl)

6 Barfly, My hacking skills aren't what you imagine. I would have no idea how to get into E&P's server to change wording in a column. I remembered that column from four years ago because it enraged me so at the time. I wrote a letter contemporaneously to Romenesko's blog about it, but no one seemed to think this was a big deal. But that's because at the time I worked for the MSM and when writing to Romenesko I was talking to the MSM, and E&P circulated only to the MSM. Talk about a closed circuit! As for the word changes, I don't see the point. Mitchell made clear in the original (fifth graf) that he was a 19-year-old intern and I referenced that in my letter. Putting it in the lede ex post facto doesn't change much. Anyway, this whole episode has been an instructive lesson in how the new media has changed everything.

Posted by: Jon Ham at August 26, 2006 08:04 AM (oaai4)

7 Mike Wallace can learn a thing or two from Greg Mitchell.

Posted by: jay at August 26, 2006 08:20 AM (tG/yU)

8 "And we're supposed to just trust that you wingers aren't covering for each other?" Barfly: it looks like you owe them an apology. Will one be forthcoming? I doubt it.

Posted by: Charlie the Hammer at August 26, 2006 09:01 AM (F427A)

9 With the original article clearly stored in the Internet Archives, "Barfly" and Mr. Mitchell will have to back up from the "smear campaign" claims and try something else. Attacking the bloggers as Wing Nuts is no doubt one plan, which they've already started. Hard to see that that will work when anyone with a spare minute can confirm this for themselves. E&P can only pray that a bigger story will surface that will distract their critics. But bigger than the challenge to E&P will be the challenge for the New York Times. Mr. Mitchell has been a "long time contributor" for the paper of record. I wonder what similar "skills" he's applied there? Anyone care to look?

Posted by: Regret at August 26, 2006 09:13 AM (4Rdaz)

10 Good work.

Posted by: Patterico at August 26, 2006 09:16 AM (nzgAx)

11 It's not the crime, it's the coverup. Except in this case it's the crime too.

Posted by: Barfy at August 26, 2006 09:17 AM (9dLdW)

12 Coverup ? Who does he think you are? The Edgartown police investigating an automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island?

Posted by: Actual at August 26, 2006 09:32 AM (jSipq)

13 That wasn't much of an apology, Barfly.

Posted by: Laddy at August 26, 2006 09:39 AM (4/q5L)

14 Barfly: Come on, don't apologize, dig deeper! Obviously, those right-wing ideologues at the WaybackMachine are in on the act. Google's cache--and everybody else who will have looked at the prior-to-change version is part of the conspiracy, too! Call Oliver Stone!

Posted by: A. Rickey at August 26, 2006 09:52 AM (BWWt2)

15 What's new? Making up stories is part of lazy journalism practiced since Guttenburg. Its now getting more notice because of the blogging community which has become like a uncontrollable thruth serum. Of course, 3 martini journalists don't like it - why should they.

Posted by: Jack Lillywhite at August 26, 2006 09:52 AM (y0YKw)

16 Laddy, if you look closely, 'Barfy' is not 'Barfly'. They even indicate different email addresses. I think the best we can hope for is that 'Barfly' will STFU, having no sane response that can be fit into the Derangement Syndrome worldview.

Posted by: The Monster at August 26, 2006 09:52 AM (tw5mW)

17 Hmmn, he was there in 1967 reporting about the Falls being turned off? I thought the Corp of Engineers did that in 1969 not 1967.

Posted by: Uncle_Walther at August 26, 2006 09:58 AM (u0+aA)

18 That doesn't sound like an apology to John Ham to me, Barfly.

Posted by: w3 at August 26, 2006 10:04 AM (DRifx)

19 This little fracas is getting to be par for the course with Editor and Publisher. The magazine is as much about left-wing editorializing and activism as it is about media criticism. See here: http://blogs.rocky mountainnews.com/denver/temple/archives/2006/08/why_editor_publ.html And here: http://www.inopinion.com/features/?itemid=951 And here: http://www.inopinion.com/features/index.php?itemid=805

Posted by: David Mastio at August 26, 2006 10:13 AM (ac6h5)

20 I've always wondered how the barking moonbats could support the conspiracy theories they come up with. Now ... evidence that at least one of them is a drunk and has pickled his brain. It begins to come together.

Posted by: NahnCee at August 26, 2006 10:15 AM (p1fbb)

21 1967... 1969... what's the difference? Uncle looks to be correct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagra_Falls

Posted by: w3 at August 26, 2006 10:19 AM (DRifx)

22 Barfly, In your original comment, you thought that C.Y. had misquoted the E&P article by Mitchell, right? Then in this thread, you wrote (8/26/06 3:16am) that a right-wing blogger might have altered the text of Mitchell's E&P article to create this kerfluffle. You mean that Jon Ham or somebody hacked E&P's site and made the text alterations illicitly and without Mitchell's or E&P's knowledge, right? Jon Ham noted the obvious (8:04am), that it's a bit of a stretch to hang the subtle changes in the article on uberhacking feats by bloggers unaffiliated with E&P. Then you recently commented (9:17am) It's not the crime, it's the coverup. Except in this case it's the crime too. I'm confused. What do you now see as the crime, and what do you think the coverup is?

Posted by: AMac at August 26, 2006 10:19 AM (GWP+/)

23 Wow, IÂ’ve heard of rewriting history, but that is a literal rewrite. I would think that in the long run, the MSM would be grateful to bloggers, for helping them with their fact checking. ItÂ’s not like bloggers want to destroy all news agencies, but rather for them to tighten up the screws. When youÂ’re caught, you have to repent and move on. You donÂ’t get to counter accuse. I guess thatÂ’s the new definition of good journalism.

Posted by: brando at August 26, 2006 10:20 AM (K+VjK)

24 Okay, am i the only person who doesn't really care. Okay, so he added that he was 19 and an intern. He added a little mitigating info. so what? At worst, he should have noted the minor change, but so long as it is true, i don't see how its a big ethical lapse to add it in. The real headline is he has done this himself.

Posted by: A.W. of Freespeech.com at August 26, 2006 10:22 AM (ajx3n)

25 Except, A.W., it looks like he was lying about being 19 if the falls were actually turned off in 1969 as Wikipedia indicates. What we appear to have hear is an interesting story...

Posted by: Jason Blair at August 26, 2006 10:30 AM (retis)

26 off coarse, Eye mint "here". Stupdi tiepos.

Posted by: Jason Blair at August 26, 2006 10:32 AM (retis)

27 The Falls were shut off in 1969, not 1967. Was this just a typo at E&P or another clumsy lie? When was Greg Mitchell born? Was he a 19 year old intern in 1969, when he fabricated the Falls story?

Posted by: Lewis at August 26, 2006 10:33 AM (hfEuj)

28 The Monster wrote (9:52am): if you look closely, 'Barfy' is not 'Barfly'. They even indicate different email addresses. Sorry, Barfly, my bad at 10:19am--missed that. I still hope you do share your current thinking on how the changes at E&P came to pass.

Posted by: AMac at August 26, 2006 10:34 AM (GWP+/)

29 A classic case of digging deeper, and an extraordinary irony. Mitchell presented the tale as a learning experience: he was only 19, an intern. As he wrote it, he must have thought how safely distant that lapse was, his position at the helm of E&P proof of how far he'd come. Who could doubt he had learned right from wrong? Changing the article, assuming Mitchell did it, suggests he would have profitted from a few more lessons in ethics, particularly given parallels with the recent photo scandals. That old E&P article is a historical artifact, a piece of evidence, that an honest journalist would have to deal with as is. However, as in the case of the corrupt photojournalists, the evidence (text/image) that's available didn't tell quite the right story, so it had to be altered. The change is modest, as Jon Ham points out above. It does not change the facts of the story, only the effect of the story on the reader. But it does change the fact of the story itself, and it does reveal a distrust of the reader great enough to rationalize dishonesty. How common is this attitude among journalists? How often do well-meaning journalists rationalize dishonesty in the name of "truth"? Truth of this sort is unmoored from facts and essentially a literary effect.

Posted by: clazy at August 26, 2006 10:38 AM (BJOWr)

30 What do you now see as the crime I've submitted this case to the Kos jury for deliberation. The charge: Criticism of an apparent leftwing moonbat who admits to "making shit up" as a journalist. The defense: incoherant rambling and nonsense. Verdict: Innocent by reason of being a fellow traveler ;->

Posted by: Purple Avenger at August 26, 2006 10:39 AM (+u+9/)

31 Barfy Barfly

Posted by: spacemonkey at August 26, 2006 10:42 AM (qSKHX)

32 Well... Wikipedia seems pretty certain that it was June, 1969 that the falls were turned off to work on the rock faces, not 1967. So the question is, was Mitchell 21, not 19, when he fabricated those quotes? Anybody got access to Mitchell's DOB?

Posted by: MrJimm at August 26, 2006 10:43 AM (K4jYa)

33 that was supposed to be a mathematical 'not equal' sign.

Posted by: spacemonkey at August 26, 2006 10:44 AM (qSKHX)

34 They should have put a note saying the article had been updated. So that's a little sneaky. However--the issue itself is a non-issue. Yeah, he made a minor mistake 40 years ago!~ And he is admitting it in the article because it's relevant. And yet the "character" death squads get called out. Absurd. How is dialogue to exist with such over-the-top over-reaction--please. Without sin, throw the first stone and all that. Come on. Cripes.

Posted by: lee kane at August 26, 2006 10:48 AM (T3vq4)

35 Btw, how old was Domenech when he plagiarized? And what happened to him?

Posted by: Patterico at August 26, 2006 10:58 AM (nzgAx)

36 Lee. A mistake is when you grab the wrong coffee cup. "Mistake" has no component of will in it. Mitchell didn't make a mistake. He lied on purpose. And he did it for a reason, to make it easy on himself.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at August 26, 2006 10:59 AM (rAMA0)

37 Umm, lee - rewriting the article three years after the fact is not a good journalistic practice. Adding an 'Update' would be okay. Updated: This article has generated some recent interest, I'd like to make it more clear that the example I give is from when I was 19 years old, working as an intern. Greg Mitchell ------------------ Original text. ------------------

Posted by: BumperStickerist at August 26, 2006 11:03 AM (PcDvW)

38 Lee Kane, For a business engaged in reporting facts, a "little sneaky" is like "a little bit pregnant".

Posted by: Chants at August 26, 2006 11:03 AM (PvJWa)

39 Looks like Mitchell was indeed 21 at the time, based on a 2003 article listing his age as 55. http://suitablyflip.blogs.com/suitably_flip/2006/08/recovering_fabu.html

Posted by: Flip at August 26, 2006 11:11 AM (OmwM3)

40 Will Editor & Publisher finally change their name to Fabricator & Airbrusher? The MSM deserves a worthies cataloger of its demise than this.

Posted by: hehster at August 26, 2006 11:26 AM (S7FHT)

41 No updated response from Barfly yet.... If this were a 1337 h4x0r website, they'd have a word for what happened to Barfly... PWNED!!11!! Hey Spacemonkey, I kind of like Barfy.

Posted by: Lubbert Das at August 26, 2006 11:35 AM (jz18l)

42 Just a thought: Have you checked barfly's IP address? -- Erik

Posted by: Erik at August 26, 2006 11:37 AM (H2vXM)

43 This is just another example of the fifth column in America exposing itself.

Posted by: Tood at August 26, 2006 11:52 AM (QRBhQ)

44 A.W., I guess it's just you. The post-publication edits are not, as you pointed out, noted. The piece is simply edited as if it were written that way in 2003. Was the piece edited as recently as August 2006? If so, why? You seem to believe the details are simply mitigating, but Barfly brings forward the accusation that it was Jon Ham who edited the piece to make Greg Mitchell look back. I would present to you that it was someone working on behalf of Greg Mitchel to make Jon Ham look unethical in the face of Ham's disgust at what Mitchell calls trivial and common fabrication. Think about it.

Posted by: w3 at August 26, 2006 11:52 AM (DRifx)

45 I must immediately retract my accusation. Looking at the edit history at the Wayback Machine it seems as if the story was edited between November 5, 2003 and January 17, 2004. So it does indeed look as if the details are mitigating even if they are not accurate.

Posted by: w3 at August 26, 2006 11:56 AM (DRifx)

46 Faking the news is nothing new. In one of his memoirs, Henry Louis Mencken relates that as a cub reporter covering the waterfront for the Sunpapers in Baltimore, he and the other cub reporters for the other 5 dailies in the city decided the weather was too nasty to work, and so they spent the day in a tavern, eating & drinking. To cover themselves, they made up a story which they all turned in to their editors. The next day, Mencken's editor confronted him: Nice work, he said, this time at least you spelled the names right. Now if any researcher happened upon that story in the archives of the Sunpapers, and confirmed that all of the daily newspapers in the city had the identical story, he would be certain that the events recounted actually occurred. But it was all made up. Making up the news is an old story. Getting caught by the blogosphere is what's new.

Posted by: Gandalin at August 26, 2006 11:57 AM (ltFM+)

47 Barfly has cut 'n run.

Posted by: Garth Farkley at August 26, 2006 12:02 PM (2y863)

48 AW of Freespeech's comment is not unfair, and it would be tempting to go with it. If they had been true (see, conservatives understand stuff like the subjunctive too, y'know) the additions, though clearly intended to offer youth and inexperience as excuses, would have been fairly minor. But they're not just nothing. They actually illuminate his original comments interestingly, suggesting a person of low social courage who has an inordinate fear of looking foolish. Which ties in pretty strongly with the criticism of MSM figures as "all on the same page," "living in a bubble," "drawn from the same political class," etc. So by giving us less information, then having to backtrack and grudgingly give more to cover their asses, they end up by revealing more about themselves than they ever intended.

Posted by: Assistant Village Idiot at August 26, 2006 12:03 PM (1w197)

49 BTW, here's confirmation of the 1969 date from a non-Wikipedia source. (courtesy LGF)

Posted by: Abu Al-Poopypants at August 26, 2006 12:14 PM (QB67L)

50 And here's the edit history according to the archive: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mediainfo.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1891030 You have to click on each edit to determine when the excuses, er I mean details, were added. CY, where did you find the May-November 2003 version of the story or is it your assertion that the story on mediainfo.com to which you linked was the source for your blockquote? Can you clarify?

Posted by: w3 at August 26, 2006 12:17 PM (DRifx)

51 The version on the WayBack machine does explicitly state that Mitchell was a 19-year-old summer intern: Still, I felt bad about it for years and (obviously) have never forgotten it. On the other hand, I was, at the time, just 19, it was a summer internship, and I'd only been on the job about a month.

One of the many alarming things about the Jayson Blair scandal is that he never grew up, and no one at The New York Times ever seemed to notice. My ethical breach at 19 in Niagara Falls was bad enough. One expects a bit more from a 27-year-old with years of experience in New York.

Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein at August 26, 2006 12:43 PM (endTl)

52 Checking the Wayback Machine more closely, not only was the article substantively editted, but the audit trail for changes was faked, as well. The article was in 2003. There are 3 change entries listed in 2003, and their web address gives a matching datestamp. For example, the change listed as "Nov 05, 2003" has a "20031105072113" embedded in the archive URL. The 2003 updates do not have the bit about being a 19 year old intern. There are 2 changes listed in 2004. They both have the 19 year old intern bit. However, the url shows the updates occuring in 2006. For example, the change linked on Wayback as "Jan 17, 2004" has embedded "20060826173129". Assuming those are Greenwich timestamps (5 hours ahead of the US east coast), it means the update was added earlier today. Here's the Wayback change history url for the article in question http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mediainfo.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1891030 It shows 5 changes, purporting that 3 were in 2003 and 2 in 2004. Each change link goes to a url of the form http://web.archive.org/web/ TIMESTAMP ARTICLESPECIFIC The 3 2003 changes have url parts that agree with the date. None of these have the 19 year old intern bit. The 2 changes purporting to be from 2004 have timestamps in with 20060826 in them. The 2 changes are seconds apart and both have the 19 year old intern claim. It wouldn't shock me if the change history gets altered again. For posterity, the current link for the first version with the 19 year old intern claim purports to be "Jan 19, 2004" but the link goes to the url "http://web.archive.org/web/20060826175353/http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1891030"

Posted by: Lewis at August 26, 2006 12:57 PM (hfEuj)

53 Lewis, I cannot confirm your claims. The URLs I get are now: http://web.archive.org/web/20040117221659/http://www.mediainfo.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1891030 and http://web.archive.org/web/20041128205109/http://www.mediainfo.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1891030 As you can see, there is no 2006 timestamp there.

Posted by: w3 at August 26, 2006 01:09 PM (DRifx)

54 I see. When I click on the links to the 2004 versions it resolves to a URL that is formatted as Lewis claims. When I click on the links to the 2003 versions they resolve to URLs that are formatted as though the date stamp is 2003. Maybe this time stamp does not indicate what you think it is? I don't know. Curiouser and curiouser.

Posted by: w3 at August 26, 2006 01:20 PM (DRifx)

55 E&P used to be nothing but a classified ad vehicle for journalism jobs. Nobody ever paid attention to its editorial content before Mitchell came on board. He made it a vehicle for a sort of preserved-in-amber 1960s ethos, dressed in 21st century clothes. Strangest thing about this story: Why would a 19-year-old whose internship revealed to him that he could not approach strangers then continue on as a newspaperman? I was a 19-year-old intern a few years earlier than Mitchell, and if I'd found I was that shy about approaching strangers, I would have found another career.

Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 26, 2006 01:24 PM (byoh1)

56 We're forgetting what is most important in all of this: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH Not to mention Ted Turner's Ministry of Truth self-censorship of decades of cartoons to eliminate what is not politically correct today (i.e. smoking in Tom and Jerry)

Posted by: Symes at August 26, 2006 01:44 PM (EXkFi)

57 Lindsay, the article has also been edited without notation. Do you agree? I'm guessing that Greg has heard the story of the annual competition at the Prevaricator's Club. The reigning champ tells a tale of having been the only person ever to go UP Niagra Falls in a barrel. The challeneger, in a winning bid, simply says: "I know you did. I saw you do it." E&P: You lie, we swear to it.

Posted by: Pablo at August 26, 2006 01:55 PM (EErm0)

58 The original at TWM does have the references to him being a 19 year old intern in the fifth and sixth paragraphs -- just not the first one. And the asterisks on the Way Back Machine search page don't necessarily indicate changes in the text. Updating the page could be something like a change in formatting (which does occur here). But today's date in the URL of an update that was supposedly made back in 2004 is disturbing. That's pretty good evidence of a deliberate attempt to mislead people -- why, I can't imagine, since moving information already found later in the article up to the lede doesn't accomplish much. And pretty stupid not to have forged the change all the way back to the beginning. Unless he couldn't.

Posted by: LB at August 26, 2006 02:05 PM (r/50u)

59 The date in the Wayback URL is the date of the last crawl. So unfortunately, Wayback did not actually crawl or archive any versions of the story in 2004. We cannot know for a fact what those stories looked like in 2004 according to wayback. How did I end up on the live version of a site? or I clicked on X date, but now I am on Y date, how is that possible?

Posted by: w3 at August 26, 2006 02:12 PM (DRifx)

60 Yes, the E&P article was edited without notation. Looks fishy to me, and utterly pointless. Why bother covertly rewriting a lede when the relevant information was already in the article?

Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein at August 26, 2006 02:15 PM (endTl)

61 Exactly the right question, Lindsay. I think the answer lies in disrespect for your (or his, as it were) readers and your profession. He's just so much more clever than the rest of us.

Posted by: Pablo at August 26, 2006 02:24 PM (EErm0)

62 I believe CY took his blockquote from the link that I sent him yesterday. That version on the MediaInfo site did NOT have the 19-year-old intern info in the lede as of yesterday. It was as I remembered it from May 2003 when I posted my letter on the Poynter site. I don't think there's any question that it got changed yesterday afternoon or late last night.

Posted by: Jon Ham at August 26, 2006 02:30 PM (oaai4)

63 w3, upon further checking, I see the links purporting to be for changes in 2004 behave differently. The 2003 links give a timestamp in 2003 in the url. The links purporting to be in 2004 give an embedded timestamp that appears to be the Greenwich time of when the link was clicked. So, if you click the link twice, 2 minutes apart, you'll get different links, with timestamps 2 minutes apart and representative of the Greenwich time of when you click the links. Note that the old links persist, at least for a few hours. The first link, which I noted in my post above, still works. I find it hard to believe they save directories for every time someone clicks a link for years. I've checked other urls with changes in 2004. All of them give timestamps in the url which agree with the purported change date on the Wayback page. I've tried this for pages with multiple stories (e.g. instapundit.com) and single articles in other publications with 2004 changes. So, Confederate Yankee quoted what he thought to be the story. The story was changed, with an audit log that claimed the change which added the 19 year old intern claim were in 2004. However, Wayback recovery of "intern" links doesn't use Wayback's mechanism for retrieving archives. Wayback uses a uniform mechanism for the 2003 archives and the archives in 2004 for every other article or page I've checked. It's just the change for this article adding the "intern" claim, purported to be in 2004, that doesn't act like an archive. When Confederate Yankee first linked the story, he didn't go searching for an old copy. I don't think he got an old copy. I think the version without the "intern" claim was the version of record as recently as yesterday. It's odd someone would make 2 changes, separated by months in 2004, that got the date of Niagara closing wrong by 2 years. Especially if the biographical info linked earlier in the comments is correct, i.e. that Mitchell was 19 in 1967 when he interned but was 21 when he actually faked the story. We know Mitchell faked the original Niagara story because he admitted it. We know the update on his article about his fakery is factually incorrect (since Niagara wasn't shut down in 1967 but in 1969). We have an old interview that puts Mitchell's age at 19 in 1967 and 21 in 1969, when he actually faked the article. We have an audit trail for the addition of the "19 year old intern" claim that does not behave like other articles on Wayback or even like the earlier change logs for that article. This looks like deliberate fakery, not when Mitchell was 19 or 21 or even a factually incorrect mea culpa added in 2004. It looks like a fake planted this month. I'd appreciated it if those more familiar with Wayback can doublecheck me. Perhaps there is a special nonarchive archive that behaves in this manner for a special class of articles and only in a special date range. At this point, that's not the way to bet.

Posted by: Lewis at August 26, 2006 02:51 PM (hfEuj)

64 Well -- E&P has rewritten things before. In 2005 (I think ..looking for the email) they had an article in which President Bush "refused" to leave the school class he was at after being informed of the attacks. I wrote questioning the use of the word "refused." (I told them that English was only my first language, so maybe I could be wrong as to its meaning.) Interestingly they re-wrote that sentence in the online article.

I want to know how come they are the journalism-editor gurus when they don't know how to use language accurately? Anyway -- they have done rewrites of posted articles with no mea culpas. The question is why is it so important to rewrite this one when, as some others have pointed out, the age and intern info was already in there. I suppose one could say that young shy (??) journalists are allowed to make stuff up.

"Everybody" does. :-(

Posted by: JAL at August 26, 2006 03:07 PM (/XUEA)

65 I agree with you, Lewis. The only point I want to make clear is that when Wayback lacks an actual copy of a page they indicate has changed on a particular date, it will redirect to either the lastest copy they have or a live version of the page. It seems as though the 2004 versions were not archived by Wayback but marked as changed in some way. The links to the 2004 pages seem to redirect to what is there now. I don't think Wayback ever archived the pages from 2004, only 2003.

Posted by: w3 at August 26, 2006 03:14 PM (DRifx)

66 w3 writes "I don't think Wayback ever archived the pages from 2004, only 2003." I'd state it more strongly. Wayback was given an indication that updates were made in 2004, but it isn't true. The updates were made this month, after Confederate Yankee posted the article of record. Confederate Yankee posted and linked to the article of record August 25, 2006. At that time (yesterday), it did not contain the "19 year old intern" claim. The 2004 change dates are fakes. The reason Wayback performs differently here than on other articles is because there has been an incomplete attempt to corrupt the audit trail. I strongly suspect the attempt to corrupt the audit trail happened this month and was deliberate. I don't know enough about how Wayback works to say how they did it. It's probably something simple like setting a change date of record field that, if left blank, picks up when a web crawl notices the change. If such a thing is event driven (eg an RSS feed of changes) an automatic method will record it changing on the day the change was posted, unless specified otherwise.

Posted by: Lewis at August 26, 2006 03:45 PM (hfEuj)

67 Good catch, Confederate Yankee! You've got another scalp. No surprise that people who defend Hizballah propaganda manipulating the news out of Lebanon would turn out to be filthy liars themselves. Cleaning up the reporting out of Lebanon should never have been a partisan issue to begin with, but for whatever reason the Left has made it one.....

Posted by: LoafingOaf at August 26, 2006 03:51 PM (vFS/o)

68 Apparently to Mitchell and people like him truth and honor are flexible. Mistakes made as a youth just minor mistakes...inconsequntial. And the idea seems to carry on. Why bother with a few cheats and liars in the press? When I was 19 I was carrying an M-16 and at 21 commanding an infantry platoon. Honor and truthfulness were not inconsequential; they had real consequences and cheats and liars could not be tolerated. In today's world the media has a huge impact on public opinion, and in a democracy that translates to what our leaders do. Cheats and liars cannot be tolerated; the stakes are just too high. Yet Mitchell can't even see this and the reason is quite clear. Personal moral failure.

Posted by: Quilly Mammoth at August 26, 2006 03:57 PM (MtuFC)

69 Have you checked barfly's IP address? I'll bet one of Ace's juiceboxs it is somewhere in Brazil ;->

Posted by: Purple Avenger at August 26, 2006 03:59 PM (+u+9/)

70 OK so you're insane, right?

Posted by: jason at August 26, 2006 04:39 PM (PGGTb)

71 Wait! I got it! That date - 1967 - was seared...seared in his memory! Just think - if it indeed happened in 1969 (verified by at least two independent sources, judging by the above comments), then he must have been 21 - much, much closer in age to when he got his first "real" job in journalism.

Posted by: MrJimm at August 26, 2006 05:31 PM (K4jYa)

72 I put up the definitive proof of the timestamp issue just now at LGF, simply because I'm more familiar with what I can get away with, formatting-wise. Bottom line is that the two '2004' edits were crawled in REVERSE ORDER of how they purport to having been made.

Posted by: The Monster at August 26, 2006 06:36 PM (tw5mW)

73 JAL, E&P and its staff are not gurus of publishing. It was a job-hunting service -- a money-making one for a long time, although the Internet has pretty much eclipsed it now. My boss dropped his subscription at least 8 years ago. Mitchell got to be editor of a moribund publication and started punching out Tom Haydenish editorials. Except for Jim Romenesko, who will link to anything, nobody in newspapering pays any attention. In that sense, this is a tropical low -- not even a tempest -- in a very small teapot. I have enjoyed the dismantling of Mitchell not because he is an important spokesman for my profession. He is not even an unimportant spokesman for my profession. He is a nobody. I have enjoyed it because I think his editorials are a disgrace (and I've told him so) and I enjoy watching incompetents get theirs.

Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 26, 2006 07:16 PM (PXKeq)

74 This is such a non-story, is this a joke? Are there not real stories out there, talk about trying to invent a contreversy. I have seen LGF and Michelle Malkin change content without indications before.

Posted by: RealityCheck at August 26, 2006 09:38 PM (j2vGP)

75 Garth Farkley: Remember, it isn't cut and run, it "redeployed over the horizon."

Posted by: clark at August 26, 2006 11:39 PM (VmpAc)

76 "And we're supposed to just trust that you wingers aren't covering for each other?" -- Barfly Lord Rove hacked the passwords to the Google cache.

Posted by: Laika's Last Woof at August 27, 2006 03:30 AM (XAylz)

77 From June 12, 1969 to November 25, 1969 he only found a weekend to visit the dry falls? CouldnÂ’t find any friends who had been there and talk to them? By July it was a major attractionÂ… Just lazy, I guess. I mean, really, 19 or 21 he could have interviewed a few of his buddies at a bar and seen if they had seen the falls. That is *also* tourism. And what is even worse is that with just a bit of background he could have made a puff piece into something a bit less puffy. But that would require *dedication* to being a journalist, adhering to journalistic ethics and going after *more* than the story. The Perlmutter piece by E&P was bad. And I wrote to them on that before this debacle here. Excuse me if I do not think much of them and *their* dedication to the public.

Posted by: ajacksonian at August 27, 2006 06:34 AM (4rGOl)

78 RealityCheck: "I have seen LGF and Michelle Malkin change content without indications before." When? What content? Both sites use updates prodigiously. Please advise.

Posted by: Pablo at August 27, 2006 07:34 AM (EErm0)

79 things must be pretty desperate in wingnutland when this is all you guys have to talk about. "ooh, mitchell was 21, not 19, when he faked a quote -- yet another liberal media conspiracy revealed." get a grip, people. your president (he's definitely not mine) has sent this country swirling down the toilet. two-thirds of America agrees with me. and all you can do use flimsy prextexts to attack his critics. it's sad and pathetic.

Posted by: dt at August 27, 2006 08:31 AM (g/Qrs)

80 Someone calling themselves "RealityCheck" giving assertions as proof. Our schools really do not teach the appreciation of irony enough. Funny, but when I see non-stories I don't even bother to waste my time to comment. If there's nothing to see, just move along.

Posted by: w3 at August 27, 2006 08:48 AM (DRifx)

81 I think what you have to give Mitchell credit for is the fact that somehow in 1967 he knew the falls were going to be shut down in 1969. Either that or he completely fabricated a story in 1967....LOL. BTW - I am being facetious. dt - great name - stand for delerium tremons? Are you Barfly in disguise? At any rate - Bush's ratings have been back over 40% for some time now so your two-thirds comment is off track. Care to revise? It seems to me that you and yours spend an awful lot of time piping the same tune about a President that can't run again....LOL. What a waste of time on your part. Got anything else?

Posted by: Specter at August 27, 2006 09:21 AM (ybfXM)

82 Maybe I am not understanding all of this correctly- Is it the contention of Mr. Mitchell, E&P, Barfly, el al, that aside from the cover-up issue (not really an issue, is it?) that Mr. Mitchell can be forgiven the fact that he manufactured a story out of the ether because he was a 19 year old intern? I worked for a local paper starting as a senior in high school and the first and most important lesson that was CONSTANTLY hammered into me was being accurate and honest in my reporting. I was told that without the ability to report accurately and with some honest attempt at impartiality, there would be no support from the public, and rightly so. It doesn't matter if Mr. Mitchell was 19, 39, or 49, the fact that he admitted falsifing a story IS the news. (Yet another cardinal sin-becoming the news rather than reporting it) In the absense of any genuine remorse and apology, I cannot help but believe that the general public would have little reason to trust anything that Mr. Mitchell, and by association, the organization that publishes him, prints.

Posted by: Richard at August 28, 2006 01:53 PM (12umn)

83 [When they talk to "that person," I hope they remind him that 1967 is long past, but character flaws are forever.] Kind of like a president being a cocaine user and alcoholic in the '70's. Just saying.

Posted by: TimWB at August 28, 2006 03:46 PM (n6rxJ)

84 Oh Timmy, But it is YOU folks who constantly tell us that being addicted to such substances is a DISEASE, not a character flaw. ADMITTING to having such habits, and successfully kicking them demonstrates great character. And, Timmy, please note that announcing that you've kicked your habit as you step into your limo at Betty Ford is not equivalent to having actually done so. So, Timmy, you are a typical lib driven only by your NEED to bash Bush. You utterly fail to see that using this particular line of "reasoning" hoists you on your own patoot: Bush drank, and Mitchell lied way back when. Mitchell is still lying. Badly.

Posted by: BillSmith at August 28, 2006 05:11 PM (3kalG)

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Greg Mitchell, the editor of the influential news trade publication Editor and Publisher has recently raised a spirited defense against questions and allegations that news may have been staged in some instances in the recent Israeli/Hezbollah war in Lebanon, may sound particularly defensive because of his own guilty history of staging news:

Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

I never found out. Oh, I went down to the falls, all right, but when I got there, I discovered that I just could not wander up to strangers (even dorky ones wearing funny hats and knee socks) and ask them for their personal opinions, however innocuous. It was a puffball assignment, but that wasn't why I rebelled. I just could not bring myself to do it.

So I sat on a park bench and scribbled out a few fake notes and then went back to the office and wrote my fake story, no doubt quoting someone like Jane Smith from Seattle, honeymooning with her husband Oscar, saying something like, "Gosh, I never knew there was so much rock under there!"

Of course, I got away with it.

Somehow, Greg, I don't think that you did. (h/t Jon Ham)

Update: Mary Katharine Ham has more.

Major update: More Fakery?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:41 PM | Comments (34) | Add Comment
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Bad Jawa. Great Video.

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First published as a weekly in 1884 as The Journalist, Editor & Publisher (E&P) is a monthly journal covering the North American newspaper industry.

Since 2002, Greg Mitchell has been the Editor of E&P, and he writes both an online and print column. While I've never read the print version, I have occasionally read Mitchell's online Pressing Issues column, and have actually written about what he has had to say twice in the past.

Click. Print. Bang. was a reaction to the mind of Mitchell, as in his column he advocated that the media should attempt to actively undermine (subscriber-only) the current U.S. President:

No matter which party they generally favor or political stripes they wear, newspapers and other media outlets need to confront the fact that America faces a crisis almost without equal in recent decades.

Our president, in a time of war, terrorism and nuclear intrigue, will likely remain in office for another 33 months, with crushingly low approval ratings that are still inching lower. Facing a similar problem, voters had a chance to quickly toss Jimmy Carter out of office, and did so. With a similar lengthy period left on his White House lease, Richard Nixon quit, facing impeachment. Neither outcome is at hand this time.

Lacking an impeachable offense and disappointed that Bush was reelected to a second term, Mitchell made the following alarmist cry to the journalistic community:

The alarm should be bi-partisan. Many Republicans fear their president's image as a bumbler will hurt their party for years. The rest may fret about the almost certain paralysis within the administration, or a reversal of certain favorite policies. A Gallup poll this week revealed that 44% of Republicans want some or all troops brought home from Iraq. Do they really believe that their president will do that any time soon, if ever?

Democrats, meanwhile, cross their fingers that Bush doesn't do something really stupid -- i.e. nuke Iran -- while they try to win control of at least one house in Congress by doing nothing yet somehow earning (they hope) the anti-Bush vote.

Meanwhile, a severely weakened president retains, and has shown he is willing to use, all of his commander-in-chief authority, and then some.

Mitchell's tone is both decidedly shrill and purposefully ominous, as he advocates his solution (while saying he doesn't) for what he seems to regard as the Bush problem.

I don't have a solution myself now, although all pleas for serious probes, journalistic or official, of the many alleged White House misdeeds should be heeded. But my point here is simply to start the discussion, and urge that the media, first, recognize that the crisis—or, if you want to say, impending crisis -- exists, and begin to explore the ways to confront it.

Not content with the news being reported by the media about the administration, Mitchell was publicly pushing for a confrontational antagonistic policy to be used to try to undermine the White House; a smear campaign to "start the discussion." He pushes, in no uncertain terms, to use the media to dig up scandals, building doubts and fears (his warning that people should, "cross their fingers that Bush doesn't do something really stupid -- i.e. nuke Iran" is a clear indication of his mindset).

What he hopes to accomplish by building distrust and fear of the White House in an influential media is open to interpretation, but based upon his earlier comments that Bush seemed neither likely to be impeached nor voted out, Mitchell seems to hope that with enough fear-mongering, someone sufficiently alarmed by the kind of coverage he hopes to gin up might find another way to remove Bush from office.

Not just hostile to the President, however, Mitchell has gone out of his way to condemn Israel's response to Hezbollah's rain of rockets on Israeli civilian targets, while dismissing Hezbollah's attempts at mass murder:

The word “rockets” makes Hezbollah's terror weapon of choice seem very space age, but they are in fact crude, unguided and with limited range – nothing like the U.S. prime grade weapons on the Israeli side. The vast majority of them land in the water or an empty field or explode in the air.

Mitchell again made his opinion on who was more at fault in the recent Hezbollah-triggered war in this column, and as you might expect, Mitchell placed the blame for Lebanese deaths squarely upon Israel and the White House, refusing to even mention Hezbollah's role in the column except to say that Israel created it.

Given his obvious biases, it should have been no surprise when Mitchell released this first part of a two-part column yesterday, attacking those bloggers who questioned the manipulation and staging of photos from some photojournalists in the recent war, primarily fought in Lebanon. His defense should have been expected, as every example of staged or manipulated stories and photographs attacked Israel, and the exposure of this journalistic fraud undermined the anti-Israeli view Mitchell has clearly decided to advocate.

Allahpundit at Hot Air rightfully took Mitchell's column to task, pointing out that clear examples of journalistic fraud did in fact occur, and catches Mitchell misrepresenting the comments made by Bryan Denton, a U.S. photojournalist witness to the sight of some staging performed by Lebanese wire service photographers.

Allah also notes that while Mitchell blasts bloggers and the suspicions and allegations they've made of staged photos, he pointedly refuses to discuss the fact that a German television station captured live video showing just such staging as it occurred in Qana. One can only imagine how much effort Mitchell took to avoid this well-documented proof that one of the most influential stories of the Hezbollah-Israeli war, the so-called Red Cross ambulance attack, was, in fact, almost certainly a complete fraud.

All of this sets up today's editorial from Mitchell, In Defense of War Photographers: Part II, in which Mitchell continues:

In a column here on Tuesday, I mounted a defense of the overwhelming number of press photographers in the Middle East who bravely, under horrid conditions, in recent weeks have sent back graphic and revealing pictures from the war zones, only to be smeared, as a group, by rightwing bloggers aiming, as always, to discredit the media as a whole.

Which is not to say that this is much ado about nothing. Obviously, Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer who doctored at least two images, deserved to be dismissed. A handful of other pictures snapped by others warrant investigation. In a few cases, caption information was wrong or misleading, and required correction. In addition, the controversy has sparked an overdue discussion -- some of it here at E&P -- on the credibility of all photography in the Photoshop age and the wide use of local stringers abroad in a time of cutbacks in supervision.

But, in general, the serious charges and wacky conspiracy theories against the photographers, and their news organizations, are largely unfounded, and politically driven, while at times raising valid questions, such as what represents "staging."

Were press photographers smeared, as Mitchell states, as a group?

I have heard no one doubting that news photographers have put their lives on the line to capture stories, and even when what they capture on film isn't always popular or what we want to hear in the past, we've debated it without clearly taking sides based upon ideology.

I can state for my part that I questioned the overall story the media was presenting from Qana based upon seeming inconsistencies between the stories and the photographic evidence. These questions raised by myself and others helped get an investigation launched—thought Mitchell doubtlessly disproves of it, as it is not the kind of investigation that serves the interests Mitchell's observed bias.

This success in rooting out some apparent fraud led to bloggers to look more closely at the other media information coming out of Lebanon for more, where other suspicious photos and stories emerged.

Did rightwing bloggers attempt to smear the entire media, as Mitchell alleges, or were they targeting specific questionable stories, specific questionable photographs, and photographers exhibiting a suspicious pattern of behavior?

The answer, quite obvious to those that actually read the blog posts and the commentary they generated, is that bloggers investigating specific instances uncovered general problems with how the media gathered news and verified the accuracy of the information, a fact that Mitchell begrudgingly admits. I'd like to know which "wacky conspiracy theories" Mitchell was referring to, as the Qana staging episode and the Red Cross ambulance stories most thought implausible when first proposed by bloggers, turned out to be absolutely correct.

In a significant number of the more widely disseminated blog posts asking questions and making accusations about suspicious media accounts, the suspicions of bloggers turned out to be quite well-founded. Contrary to Mitchell's suggestions, quite a few—more than a handful—of the more widely regarded questions raised by bloggers were exposed apparent staging or fraud--a remarkable achievement by people thousands of miles away from the story, doing the fact-checking and analysis that the media should have been doing, but much to their embarrassment, often did not.

Mitchell, apparently then unable to go much further on his own, decides to simply turn to the Lightstalkers photography forum, and quote heavily from media photographers denying that manipulation and staging took place. And while the much-respected Tim Fadek can say all he wants that the scene in Qana wasn't staged, and other photographers choose to take his observations as fact, when I see with my own eyes on YouTube that it was indeed directed by none other than Mr. Green Helmet himself, I have every right to doubt the veracity of Mr. Fadek and other photographers that denied Qana was staged, along with the media organizations that try to act that such compelling evidence of malfeasance does not exist.

I suspect that Mitchell's next groundbreaking column will expose that according to interviews with inmates at San Quentin, 99% are actually innocent.

This E&P editorial chooses to dodge the real issues of the media's vetting of the accuracy of the stories and photographs that they chose to print coming out of Lebanon and other venues, just as they dodged how so many pictures and events ever had reason to be questioned in the first place.

Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher shows himself to be a prime example of exactly what bloggers fear most in the media; a newscrafter, not a newsman, with a quite specific and heavily partisan agenda. He seems terrified that if the public actually looked too closely at how the sometimes tainted product of the news business is manufactured, they might discover it has fewer quality checks than a disposable diaper, and sadly, sometimes ends up smelling much the same.

David Perlmutter wrote of the problems with photojournalism last week:

I'm not sure, however, if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both.

A simple glance at such industry leaders as Greg Mitchell suggests that not only are the wounds are indeed self-inflicted, but that some newscrafters can't keep their fingers from jerking the trigger.

Update: Allah reacts as well.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:59 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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CNN's web team doesn't appear to be a big fan of Joe Lieberman. While the actual article carries the headline, "Lieberman secures spot on November ballot," the Web team decided this was a fitting link:

This would presumably be the same "fine folks" that brought us this gem in July:

Top-notch. Professional. Pithy.

This is CNN.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:27 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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It is horrific that they would risk a child's life by forcing him so close to an unexploded but still very much "live" bomb.

It is even worse that they admit it (my bold) (h/t LGF):

When Um Ali Mihdi returned to her home in the southern Lebanese city of Bint Jbeil two days ago, she found a 1,000lb (450kg) Israeli bomb lying unexploded in her living room.

The shell is huge, bigger than the young boy pushed forward to stand reluctantly next to it while we get our cameras out and record the scene for posterity.

The bomb came through the roof of the single-storey house and half-embedded itself into the floor, just missing the TV.

"Reluctantly" is correct. The Lebanese boy, wearing a blue tank top and jeans that hang on his thin frame, is visably leaning away from the unexploded ordinance, hands in pockets. That someone pushed him forward to be in such a picture, and that the BCC was willing to capitalize on this obvious bit of propaganda staging, going so far to admit it openly, is reprehensible.

This is an admittedly staged photo by an ostensibly professional and once-respected news organization. Martin Asser and any other BBC staff complicit in this event should be fired, without question.

Much to my disgust, the suicide of photojournalism continues at an every more dizzying pace.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:03 PM | Comments (35) | Add Comment
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Look at any of the casualty figures coming out of Lebanon in the world's major media organizations, and you'll see something very close to this:

The Lebanese death toll, meanwhile, rose to 842 when rescue workers pulled 32 bodies from the rubble in the southern town of Srifa, target of some of Israel's heaviest bombardment in the 34-day conflict. The figure was assembled from reports by security and police officials, doctors and civil defense workers, morgue attendants as well as the military.

The Israeli toll was 157, including 118 soldiers, according to its military and government.

What is missing from this death toll (which CBS News has now quietly removed from this web report) are the casualties sustained by Hezbollah.

Many people would presumably be interested in knowing the toll the war has had on Hezbollah, as Hezbollah's actions did indeed trigger this latest war. But a recalcitrant media has steadfastly refused to provide these figures.

The Israel Defense Forces, as a standard practice, makes an effort to photograph and document each Hezbollah fighter confirmed killed, and also estimates the number of unconfirmed/unclaimed Hezbollah casualties from air strikes and artillery fire. Certainly, a media that has spent a considerable amount of their time and resources ferreting out and reporting America's secret national security programs could easily access unclassified information, some of which has been published on the IDF's own web site. Even a cursory analysis of the world's media reporting out of Lebanon reveals that in photographs, on video and radio broadcasts, and in print, Hezbollah casualties are almost never reported. So why does the media choose to underreport Hezbollah's casualties?

The answer may at least partially lie in stories of Lebanese casualties that the world media does choose to report. Story after story, photo after photo, dead and distraught Lebanese civilians clog the mediastream, building a false, grim montage of a war in which primarily Israeli soldiers and Lebanese civilians die.

This is not the whole truth of this war, but a partial truth developed through complacency and an apparent willful disregard to report the facts on the ground. Instead of seeking and publishing the entire truth, newsrooms have decided that they will publish the stories and images framed by foreign, mostly Arab Muslim reporters, even though their own cultural interests in these events are a clear and undeniable conflict of interest precluding even a pretense of unbiased reporting.

This is beyond bias, it is a reckless and willful disregard for reporting the whole truth in favor of reporting "news" that is easier to sell in a larger world media market. The casualty statistics are there, but the media sticks to the narrative they have helped create because while honest reporting is a goal, the business of the media business is business.

If it "bleeds it leads," but only if what leads sells advertising. News consumers around the world consume the news that more closely matches their perceptions of how reality should be, and stories critical of Hezbollah, stories that show their failures and deaths, don't sell in world population featuring 1.3 billion Muslims that hope for Israel's demise, or at the very best are indifferent to their fate. It is anti-Semitism by cashflow, a pocketbook jihad that buys the media's silence.

This morning I received a comment from an IDF sergeant, stating in part:

It's not classified, but I dought[sic] you'll ever see these figures in the MSM. According to our statistics we (the IDF) have scored OVER 600 CONFIRMED enemy kills (photgrphed [sic], documented, claimed and added to the killboard, I personally scored 2 kills to add to my record) and another 800-1200 unconfirmed/unclaimed kills (this estimation includes kills form airstrikes/artillary shelling). The Hizb'Allah losses aren't counted, on the most part, against the official number of Lebanease[sic] casualties.

Hezbollah has suffered 500-600+ confirmed fatalities, and estimates are that another 800-1200 are dead; perhaps half of Hezbollah's armed forces, and yet the media chooses to ignore these readily accessed figures in favor of a more marketable Lebanese civilian body count.

The media chooses to underreport Hezbollah's casualties because it is bad for business, while it unashamedly pimps civilian corpses for profit. That is just one of the ugly realities of this war that isn't considered "all the news that's fit to print."

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:00 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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From the front page of today's JPost:

Take note of the headline and contrast it against the caption: "Hizbullah fighter watches IDF Wednesday."

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:40 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Yes, I'm getting just as tired of this kind of stuff as you are (my bold):

Lebanese civil defense volunteers unload a coffin from a refrigerator outside the Hakoomy hospital in port city of Tyre, southern Lebanon, Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2006. At least 842 people were killed in Lebanon during the 34-day campaign, most of them civilians. Israel suffered 157 dead _ including 118 soldiers.(AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)

According to the Associated Press "most" (by definition more than half; at least 421) of those who died were civilians. Considering AP's recent track record in Lebanon, I'm disinclined to believe their claim. Their vague figures run in opposition to what we see here from Strategy Page:

On the ground, Hizbollah lost nearly 600 of its own personnel, and billions of dollars worth of assets and weapons.

Ynet News, citing the IDF as a source three days ago, states that 530 Hezbollah members have been killed.

If the Hezbollah deaths cited by StrategyPage and Ynet are correct and the AP's overall casualty count is close to accurate, then more than 60% of those killed were Hezbollah fighters, even as Hezbollah attempted to hide behind old women and children.

However, when looking at the figures provided by the Associated Press, one would be tempted to infer that Hezbollah's attacks were more precisely targeted at Israeli military forces, as the AP points out that the majority of the Israelis killed by Hezbollah--118 of 157--were soldiers, while "most" of those killed by Israel were civilians.

But the AP conveniently leaves out the fact that half of the Israeli civilians killed were the result of 4,000 indiscriminately targeted Hezbollah rockets purposefully aimed at civilian areas. It also leaves out the glaring fact that Lebanese civilian casualties were so high precisely because Hezbollah chose to fight a war using Lebanese civilians as shields.

Israel specifically targeted precision weapons and artillery fire on infrastructure and Hezbollah targets, while Hezbollah aimed their rockets almost exclusively at Israeli population centers.

In the media war against Israel, somehow the captions are never quite big enough to fit that most basic truth.

Update: An IDF First Sergeant clarifies the situation with first-hand knowledge in the comments:

CY, this is a great post you have written here, though I feel I have to eluminate a few things.

I'm an IDF first sergeant and recently returned from Lebanon. And the way things are develping I might return there sooner then I've hoped.

Hizb'Allah casualties. The numbers you have presented are quite close to accurate, but they don't show the whole picture. It's not classified, but I dought you'll ever see these figures in the MSM. According to our statistics we (the IDF) have scored OVER 600 CONFIRMED enemy kills (photgrphed, documented, claimed and added to the killboard, I personally scored 2 kills to add to my record) and another 800-1200 unconfirmed/unclaimed kills (this estimation includes kills form airstrikes/artillary shelling). The Hizb'Allah losses aren't counted, on the most part, against the official number of Lebanease casualties. Hizb'Allah admits to loosing only 58 of it's own men and 21 more from their ally - the Amal terrorist organisation.
How much troops Hizb'Allah has really lost we'll probably never know since they're quite unlickly to release this information.

Hizb'Allah also lost a lot of weapons and equipment, and quite large amounts of equipment were captured by us.

But the operation wasn't deemed as successful since we didn't get our boys back. Also we (the soldiers) feel that some high ranking officers in the Northern Command had little idea what they where doing. Our political leadership could've should've done more - like sending us in early on/buying us more time to finish the job.

At any rate, Olmert chose to succumb to the will of Kofi Anan and his Useless Nations with their Hizb'Allah backed Associated Propaganda and al-Reuters spitting lies all over the world about disproportionate response and us indiscriminately
killing civilians.

But this isn't over by any means, this "cease fire" is just a temporary respite before all hell will break loose once again. And then we'll finish what we've started.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:57 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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Yesterday I quipped that I found Gatorade's new energy Drink "self-Propel," after discovering a series of three pictures by Reuters photographer Zohra Bensemra. In those photos, a mysteriously mobile bottle of water appears and disappears beside an elderly injured woman that Bensemra said was waiting to be rescued, and was made to appear utterly alone.

The moving bottle and other suspicious elements in the photos lead me to believe that this series of photos, like so many already discovered coming from Arab Muslim stringers in Lebanon, were quite likely staged.

The curious composition of Bensemra's photos continued today, as this one was, err, unearthed in Yahoo's Photostream:

I have no doubt at all that Lebanese Red Cross members are unearthing bodies from the rubble of Israeli air strikes, and will continue to do so for days weeks, and even months to come. But the damaged structure in question would seems to offer a very narrow opening, and with two rescuers already inside the cramped space (you can see the reflective stripes on the sleeve of another rescuer further in), it would seem strange to bag a body in the narrow confines of unstable rubble, when it would be both safer and easier for the rescuers to do so in the open.

Of course that is making the assumption that this is indeed a cramped space.

Another photo, which I have enlarged and then cropped to show the relevant area, indicates that the external area of the structure in question is only several yards wide, and no more than a couple of yards high. Note the expansive open area in the left side of the frame, and edge of the structure over the shoulder of the second man from the right. This structure these men were emerging from is far too narrow to be a residential building. It seems doubtful that a normal residential dwelling would have such a narrow profile, a concrete roof, walls a foot or more thick, or space for two or more live adults to body bag the undefined deceased inside, before bringing him out.

Victim, or target? House, or bunker? Perhaps the Israelis were able to kill someone other than old women and children after all.

I cannot prove that Zohra Bensemra is complicit in staging photos in Lebanon, but at the very least I can feel comfortable of accusing Bensemra of writing misleading captions that alter the context of how the picture is viewed. A caption reading "Lebanese Red Cross personnel remove the body of a person who died during an Israeli air raid during the conflict between Israel and Lebanon's Hizbollah, at Tayba in south Lebanon August 15, 2006" may be entirely accurate, but a caption reading "The body of a Hezbollah fighter is removed from a bunker near Tayba" would tell quite a different story, if that is indeed what happened.

Is Reuters photographer Zohra Bensemra a journalist, or propagandist? I'll leave that for you to decide, Myself, I tend to judge people by the company they choose to keep.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:08 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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According to Reuters photographer Zohra Bensemra, an elderly injured woman lies injured in the ruins of her house, awaiting rescue as Bensemra snaps these pictures.

Let's for a moment try to look past the staging elements that we've become accustomed to searching for over the past weeks.

Ignore for a moment the fact that a wounded elderly woman in a bombed out building is unlikely to be in the kind of physical condition needed to drag several pristine sofa pillows through the rubble and make a bed out of them. Look past the fact that she, in her weakened condition, has found a nearly spotless black blanket in the fine gray dust of a bombed out building to cover her legs against the 80 degree cold. Ignore the conveniently-placed bottled water she somehow found intact and had for the middle photo only.

Look past all this, and the total absence of any readily identifiable injury, to momentarily take Zohra Bensemra's word at face value that this is an injured, elderly woman lying in the rubble, that he seems to have stumbled across before help has arrived.

Now place yourself in Zohra Bensemra's shoes.

If you came across someone lying injured in the rubble, would you cry for assistance, seek to comfort her, or stop to determine which camera angle best captures this scene?

Would you come forward quickly and see how badly she is injured and try to render assistance, or would you compose an increasingly intimate montage of photos?

Reuters, no doubt, will offer the excuse that the photographer has the duty to capture the story, not to become part of it.

I'd like to ask Reuters when a photo-op becomes more important than basic humanity, but I'm afraid they'd be all too ready and willing with an answer.

Update: After thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided one element of these photos deserves more attention, so I updated the second photo to highlight the interesting detail.

According to the photographer's caption:

An injured Lebanese woman lies in her damaged house as she waits to be rescued during the first day of ceasefire, at Bint Jbail, east of the port city of Tyre (Soure) August 14, 2006. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra (LEBANON)

If she "waits to be rescued" alone, who, then, is moving the bottled water in the second photo out of frame in the first and third pictures? Is it Gatorade's new fitness drink, "self-Propel?"

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:27 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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If I wrote the hare-brained editorial that appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News today, I'd want it left unsigned as well.

A fisking, anyone?

THESE PEOPLE have no shame. Their contempt for democracy is so great they will stop at nothing to undermine it. Their adherence to fundamentalist beliefs that blinds them to reality is frightening. They must be stopped.

And that's just the Republicans.

Nothing like getting your mind-numbed partisanship out front.

Let's start with Vice President Dick Cheney.

Yesterday, Cheney bashed those who voted for Democrat Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Senate primary, claiming that these votes would encourage "al Qaeda types" to think that "they can break the will of the American people."

The idea is that since 18-year incumbent Joe Lieberman lost based on his support for Iraq, Americans opposing the war are waving a white flag of surrender to terrorists.

This is stunningly ignorant logic, as well as annoyingly consistent with the Bush administration's fundamentalist myth that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden - a claim by now well-discounted, most notably by a presidential commission.

Mr. Anonymous Editorialist, are you trying to tell us that Ned Lamont's cries to pull the troops home now—exactly what Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and the late Abu Musab Zarqawi have called for—is not the exact position of the world's leading terrorists?

The simple fact of the matter is that no matter how you try to shade it, the headlong retreat—or "redeployment" or whatever you want to call it—favored by the radical left is precisely what al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups desire. We know that, because they've said so, repeatedly. The only stunning ignorance displayed here is your own ignorance of the fact that both the terrorists and the Democrats agree that they want the U.S to retreat from the Middle East and stop killing terrorists.

Further, it is precisely the headlong "redeployment" that John Murtha called for from Somalia and heeded by Bill Clinton that resulted in the terror attacks of September 11.

Dead terrorists don't cause problems, and retreating from live terrorists inspires them to attempt greater acts of terror. What part of that logic are you incapable of understanding?

In addition, Mr. Anonymous Editorialist has his fingers crossed and hoped no one would actual check his facts, which would reveal that the 9/11 Commission Report did not say that Saddam's Iraq did not have ties to Osama's al Qaeda. In fact, it said something else entirely.

Bin Ladin also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. Bin Ladin had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Ladin to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Ladin in 1994. Bin Ladin is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States. Whether Bin Ladin and his organization had roles in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and the thwarted Manila plot to blow up a dozen U.S. commercial aircraft in 1995 remains a matter of substantial uncertainty.

Communications between senior officers of organizations are ties, ladies and gentlemen, whether or not they cooperated on attacks against the United States.

Iraq may not have played a role in the terror attack against America on 9/11, but al Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq certainly had ties to one another dating back to 1994, as stated by then CIA Director George Tenet:

• Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qa'ida is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank.
• We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida going back a decade.
• Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression.
• Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad.
• We have credible reporting that al-Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.
• Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al-Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.
  
  

Since the 9/11 Commission Report was issued, even more documents have shined a light on the connections between al Qaeda, their Taliban hosts, and Iraq. Mr. Anonymous Editorialist can say Iraq had no ties to al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden if he wants, but rational people looking at the still-accumulating evidence will be hard-pressed to draw that same conclusion.

But back to the editorial:

And yet the presidential fog machine has continued to belch out its Iraq-al Qaeda-link fumes to the extent that a recent poll suggests that 64 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to al Qaeda. More people than ever now believe, according to a new poll, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

No ties in the preceding paragraph has been walked back to "strong links" in this one. I've give this to the writer; when it comes to headlong retreat, he practices what he preaches.

It goes without saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction; it is a simple incontrovertible fact. He used thousands of them in his 1980-88 war with Iran, and gassed thousands of Kurds in a single four-day strike on Halabja in 1988. Iraq maintained and declared WMD stockpiles at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, and an Iraqi general says his men moved WMDs out of Iraq into Syria in the weeks before our 2003 invasion. Anonymous may discount it, but as evidence slowly accumulates, even more people will believe in Iraq's WMD capability because it did exist, and it was never fully accounted for.

Ironically, the number who believe in the al Qaeda link is almost precisely the same number of Americans - 62 percent - who believe we are bogged down in Iraq.

For Cheney - and other Republicans like GOP National Chairman Ken Mehlman - to suggest that those Americans are encouraging terrorism is reprehensible.

And yet, we have to go back to the essential fact that John Murtha's 1993 call for retreat from Somalia is directly responsible for Osama Bin Laden's decision to attack America. I certainly know it is not the Democrat's intent to encourage terrorism, but that fact—and it is a fact—remains that that is exactly what their position has done, and will continue to do.

Cheney's comments came out a day before British intelligence officials announced they had thwarted a major terrorist attack. Surely Cheney was aware of the plot and the work to thwart it, and was no doubt aware of the timing of yesterday's announcement.

To exploit a very real terror threat that could have led to major casualties, and to even indirectly implicate Americans who were exercising their democratic right by going to the polls and making a choice borders on the criminal, to say nothing of the insane.

Has Cheney completely lost it?

Mr. Anonymous has no shame. While more than eager to attack Cheney for politicizing events, he studiously avoids his own Party's attempts to politicize things as well. Should we wait until his next editorial comes out calling Teddy Kennedy or Harry Reid insane or asking if they have "completely lost it?" Probably not.

The latest terror scare is upsetting enough: It is bound to lead to havoc and chaos both domestically and internationally. It could damage the economy if fears on flying are sustained. It reopens the profound wounds of 9/11, a scab we should figure by now will never completely heal.

But the real terror is this: While our Vacationer- in-Chief and his vice president shut down dissent, and discourage questions about the way our government has directed our intelligence and military resources toward a single target in Iraq, we are no closer to understanding or dismantling the threat of al Qaeda.

They "shut down dissent," eh? I spent all this effect to fisk an overly-dramatic editorial, and the guy who wrote it will be inside a Halliburton-run concentration camp before he can even read this. Darn.

Interestingly enough, it now seems that how our President has led our intelligence and military resources may have had a direct impact in thwarting this latest attack, as the very intelligence programs that the New York Times is trying to destroy may have provided crucial intelligence. Of course, ensconced in irons in a cell somewhere near Allentown, Mr. Anonymous will never know or admit to that.

Cheney's remarks underscore just how unsophisticated our understanding of terrorism is. We have no more understanding of the global forces at work that lead so many to want to bomb and destroy innocent lives than we did five years ago.

America's latest crisis is not what happened in Connecticut; it's what was going to happen in airplanes over the Atlantic.

The immoral and ridiculous claims coming out of the Bush administration's reign of error could ultimately be responsible for the kind of casualties that al Qaeda can only dream of.

Actually, terrorism is very simple to understand. It isn't a matter of nuance. Islamists want the whole world to subscribe to their way of thinking, and those that don't, they want dead. That is why Islam partitions the world into Dar al Islam, the House of Submission for the true beleivers, and Dar al Harb, the House of War, where infidels must convert, or die. It's actually quite straightforward. Even a Sea Monkey can grasp the basic concept, even if a Philadelphia Daily News editorialist finds it too taxing.

Claims don't kill people, Mr. Anonymous Editorialist.

Terrorists do.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:11 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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German Confederate Yankee reader Niko translates this response from a letter to the photo editor of Stern magazine, a major German news magazine. The Editor-in-Chief, Andreas Trampe, attacks the reader for questioning Stern about "Green Helmet" (article translation available at EU Referendum), the designated dead baby carrier for Hezbollah in Lebanon since 1996:

Dear Mr ...,

As Editor-in-Chief of Stern's Picturedesk I write this in response to
your harsh letter dating from August 5th, 2006. So what is it that you
don't like about our reporting? What do you find lurid about that
report [i.e. the initial report depicting Green Helmet as "some rescue
worker"]? In the first two pages we show the carnage and victims in
Qana, the next two depict the carnage and victims in Haifa. The
following picture pages are equally balanced, even more so the text
which, obviously, you didn't bother to read. There's no dispute that
the Israeli air raid on that building in Qana did happen, there's also
no dispute that it caused a lot of civilian victims. So what's wrong
about that? What about it appears to be staged? Did Hezbollah dare the
Israelis to conduct the air raid in your opinion? Did Hezbollah
initiate the bomb raid on their own? Did the Palestinian [sic!]
civilian casualties never happen? Where's the faking? We did not
conduct a story about Green Helmet Ali, even less so a lurid one! That
man is featured in just a single picture and a single caption. Even if
that man were indeed to parade dead children intentionally before the
eyes of the world, those children were dead nonetheless, killed in the
raid. And sadly, they won't rise again even when fervent supporters of
Israel's politics pull out red herrings to distract from actual
events.

Your accusations of anti-Semitism on our part, or that we were hoping
for the destruction of Israel, are the biggest bullshit I've heard in
a long time (leaving aside the fact that it's factually wrong).
Israeli victims are to be bemoaned equally, the death of people in
Haifa and Jerusalem is lamentable in the same way. But crude
conspiracy theories seem to be the latest trend. Thanks to upstanding
internet bloggers. They're sitting in Norway, England or Germany, and,
of course, they're much more intelligent, smart and incredulously
independent. They possess knowledge of remote locations and events,
they're capable of classifying complex matters and doing quick
research. There you go, brave new digital world !!!

We, however, prefer to do it the old way, we send journalists and
photographers around the world for large sums of money so that they
can speak on location and directly to the people. For instance, with
Green Helmet Ali, who will answer those allegations put out, and he'll
tell our readers where he's from, what's his name, and what actually
happened on that day in Qana. That, of course, you won't find
originally reported in internet blogs. What you will find, though, is
some super post from some smartass guy about how Green Helmet Ali once
again fooled the whole world because, in actual fact, he's a secret
agent of Hezbollah. I hope you enjoy the reading.

Andreas Trampe
stern Bildredaktion / stern picturedesk
PS What was it again about intelligence and ideology?

Andreas Trampe
Stern-Picturedesk
Am Baumwall 11
20444 Hamburg
Phone: +49-40-3703-4122
Fax: +49-40-3703-5685
Mail: Trampe.Andreas@stern.de

Editor-in-Chief Trampe tells us that the crude analysis and questions brought about by bloggers about the incident in Qana isn't up to the standards of the highly trained, well-paid media on the front lines of the war in Lebanon.

Perhaps Trampe should save his self-righteous indignation, at least until he can explain this video footage (from German TV, no less) of "Green Helmet" directing the body of a child to be pulled from an ambulance, placed on a stretcher, and then paraded in front of the media.

I have no doubt that the fine media reporters and photographers in Lebanon are paid "large sums of money" as the editor states, but you might think that someone being paid so much might feel the obligation to tell the entire story, at least as long as they are unbiased, as these many Arab Muslim stringers covering a war with Israel certainly are. Of course, I'm just trying to clarify complex matters by doing quick research from another country, so what do I know?

(Note: replaced text link with Youtube video)

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Bloggers—and to a much lesser extent some media outlets—have paid considerable attention to specific examples of media manipulation in the war being fought between Hezbollah and the IDF in Lebanon and Israel, but we seem be under-covering the overall framing of the media's coverage, particularly when it comes to the subject matter chosen for coverage.

This comes into sharp relief when contrasted against the coverage we've become used to from the war in Iraq, particularly as it relates to the media coverage allowed and provided by two different insurgencies in Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iraq's predominately Sunni insurgency.

In Iraq, we've become somewhat used to embedded reporters reporting from both sides of the conflict with a fairly wide latitude to operate. Stringers, both print media and photographers, have occasionally embedded within the insurgency, providing coverage from ambushes and sniper's nests alike. The insurgents themselves often seem to be media hungry, filming operations themselves and often releasing the tapes to the media or producing them on DVDs for public consumption in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

By and large, the vast majority of video reporting allowed and encouraged by the Iraqi insurgency is combat-related. IED ambushes are particularly popular, often released as montages set to Islamist music as propaganda videos. The Iraqi insurgents have often seemed intent on portraying themselves as rebel forces actively waging a war for the people, whether or not the people would always agree.

Hezbollah, however, seems to be fighting a different kind of media war.

Hezbollah has far more control over their battlespace than does the Iraqi insurgency, and has a much tighter rein on the media reporting coming out of Lebanon. Mainstream media outlets have let this be know albeit comparatively quietly, as I mentioned in the comments of Jefferson Morely's Washington Post blog entry, The Qana Conspiracy Theory:

Anderson Cooper has already admitted that his crew has been handled by Hezbollah media minders, and CNN's Nic Robertson has openly admitted his coverage on July 18 was stage-managed by Hezbollah from start to finish. Times' Christopher Allbritton has said that Hezbollah has copies of every journalist's passport, and has "hassled many and threatened one" to cover-up what journalists have seen of Hezbollah's rocket launching operations. CBS's Elizabeth Palmer admits to being handled by Hezbollah, and being allowed to only see what Hezbollah wants them to see. They are the voices of a few, expressing the experiences of the many.

Israel Insider chronicled these disturbing examples of media control, but the media at large has been loath to make the level of Hezbollah "minding" over their reporting widely known.

With this control and the apparent complicity of many media stringers both Arab and western, Hezbollah has chosen to fight a completely different kind of media war than they one we have seen in Iraq. A review of the Yahoo! photostreams (compilations of various media photographers' work released throughout the day) coming out of Iraq and Lebanon paint two very different pictures. While the Iraqi insurgency often sought to crave media attention (especially when it was more active as an insurgency in 2004 and 2005, as opposed to today's more conflict between Sunni and Shiiite Iraqis), Hezbollah's tightly-controlled media war seeks to portray Hezbollah itself as something of a ghost.

Scan the photos coming out of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, and you'll see and unending stream of dramatic photos of dead women and children and anguished rescue workers climbing through the remains of bombed-out residential buildings, and you will see heart-rending photos of toys in the rubble. You will see mourning. You will see pain. You will see a civilian infrastructure in tatters.

What you will not see, except in very rare cases, is Hezbollah.

The "Party of God," well-known for their parades of armed masked men in the past, have vanished into the ether. You will see no Hezbollah fighters brandishing their weapons with bravado. You will see no photos of Hezbollah's rocket launchers or rockets prepared to fire upon Israel's civilian population. You will see no photographs of shattered launchers or weapons caches or even fighting aged men amid the rubble. The media itself quietly reports that anyone who does take such pictures may be killed, though you wouldn't know it from the amount of attention that disturbing detail has received in the press.

Hezbollah is fighting the Victim's War, hiding behind civilians that they set up as targeted pawns by firing rockets from inside Lebanon's villages, cites, and towns, from outside apartment buildings, hospitals and schools in residential neighborhoods.

It is a war of cowards, largely covered by sympathetic Arab Muslim stringers and their Hezbollah minders who determine what can and what cannot be reported; a war in which the "professional" media is all too complicit.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:10 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 800 words, total size 5 kb.

Not a PhotoShop, but quite obviously staged for Reuters cameraman Ali Hashisho's benefit, adding drama to the already dramatic picture of a hand protruding from the rubble. Pay special attention to the section of concrete-reinforcing iron rebar just over the victim's hand.

Another photo from the scene, this time from Mohammed Zaatari of the Associated Press. Notice the iron rebar has been bent out of the way, moved up and to the viewer's left, but that the rescuer's grasp on the victims' hand has been reestablished.

Another photo from Mohammed Zaatari. Perhaps it is merely an illusion due to how this photo was cropped, but it appears as if the rescuer may have moved slightly forward so that his hand is more parallel with the bottom of the photo, and that the rebar appears to have been bent downward to facilitate this pose.

Why would a rescuer move a piece of rebar two or possibly three times, reestablishing contact with the hand of a corpse each time, if not to create a more dramatic photo op for the Reuters and Associated cameramen assembled?

Update: A brilliant catch. The Passion of the Toys.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:34 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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