Fact-Free Journalism
Will Bunch, a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, is outraged at bloggers who've questioned an Associated Press story claiming that Iraqi Shiites had burned six Sunnis alive. But Bunch, wittingly or not, essentially concedes the argument:
Even if the report [was] wrong, and I'm not convinced that it is, it was in the context of horrific--and demonstrably true--escalating violence in Baghdad. . . .
In fact, it's almost not worth swatting at these gnats from the 101st Fighting Keyboard Commandos. I'd rather just concede, and let them have as their main talking points on the Middle East: The fact that smoke was added to a picture of a real Israeli bombing of Lebanon, that the AP printed an incorrect story about one of the hundreds of deadly acts of sectarian violence in Iraq, and even the allegation--totally unproven and not resulting in any actual charges--that one Iraqi photographer who has worked with the AP has ties to the insurgents.
For our main talking points that the Iraq war is immoral and that U.S. involvement needs to end, we'll take the lies about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda that didn't exist, and the unrelentingly sad fact that more than 2,900 Americans and tens upon tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have now died in an unnnecessary [sic] civil war, all for this mistake.
Let's see who wins that one.
Reporters, of course, are not supposed to have "talking points," and their paramount responsibility is to report the facts accurately. If a story isn't true, it is no defense that it is plausible "in the context."
As a side note, I wonder if the leftist tendency to treat the events of Scripture as if they were made up after the fact by "interpretive communities" is simple projection on their part. It is what they do all the time in order to establish the narrative which supports their own over-arching spurious worldview. Fake but accurate gets the job done.
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