Monday, December 04, 2006

The AP: Lying Liars (Surprise!!!!)

Once again, the Blogosphere/FreeRepublic "smell testers" find an element of the MSM to be...lying like a friggin' rug:

The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP.

It has to do with the AP’s Iraqi stringers and an oft-quoted Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein. Problem is, the Iraqi police say Capt. Hussein does not exist. The Iraqi police and U.S. military say an incident described in an AP report - Iraqi soldiers standing by as people were burned alive in a mosque - didn’t happen. Another AP-reported incident, U.S. soldiers shooting 11 civilians, also never happened, the military says.

When the AP was forced to acknowledge this situation, it did so in a story about a new Interior Ministry policy regarding false reports. The AP buried the fact that its own false report prompted this new policy.

This non-existent "police official" Hussein was also quoted in a radio (WISN/1130) news report last week (which I presume was from an AP dispatch.) The story sounded almost (not quite) ridiculous on its face, and I felt like calling the 1130 newsguy to tell him there's a problem with "Hussein."

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