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Jewish World Review May 30, 2005 / 21 Iyar, 5765 When will the media get it right? By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The headline on the top of the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday was: "FBI told of Quran abuses."
The wording of the headline and the prominence of the display give the
casual reader the impression the story — written by Neil Lewis of the New
York Times — was new, and that the story was true. Neither is so.
Lewis' story was based on reports of interrogations by FBI agents of
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and 2003. He noted in his third
paragraph that "they are accounts of unsubstantiated allegations made by the
prisoners under interrogation."
Lewis didn't mention that these unsubstantiated allegations had been made
before. Three Muslims with British citizenship were captured in Afghanistan
fighting for the Taliban. After their release they held a press conference
in August of last year in which they alleged a variety of abuses by guards,
including that they "routinely tossed inmates' Korans into prison toilets."
The charges, for which no evidence has been found, were widely publicized at
the time.
Nor did Lewis mention that an al Qaida training manual, captured a couple of
years ago by British police, instructs detainees to make false charges
against their captors.
So why is so much of the media giving so much prominence to a recycled story
of unsubstantiated charges made by America's enemies who have been told to
make false accusations if captured?
The immediate answer is to bail out Newsweek, whose reputation suffered when
its false story of Koran abuse sparked rioting in which 16 people were
killed.
But, as Lewis acknowledged deep in his story, "the disclosures yesterday did
not lend any new support to the specific assertions in the original Newsweek
item."
After its embarrassment, Newsweek engaged in some public soul searching
about its use of anonymous sources. But the negligible attention given to a
charge by the head of the Newspaper Guild indicates the problem is much
bigger than that.
At a meeting in St. Louis May 13, Linda Foley repeated charges made by Eason
Jordan, then the president of CNN, in February that U.S. troops were
deliberately killing journalists.
Like Jordan before her, Foley offered no evidence to support her charges.
The only newspaper in the country to report what Foley said was the Chicago
Sun-Times, in a story written by my friend Tom Lipscomb. Apparently most
journalists see nothing newsworthy about the head of our union accusing,
without evidence, our soldiers and Marines of war crimes.
Newspapers gave prominent coverage to a hysterical report released Wednesday
by Amnesty International which accused the United States of "atrocious"
human rights violations, and described Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our
times."
These charges — based again on the unsubstantiated allegations of al Qaida
prisoners — would be comical in their gross overreach were they not so
vile.
Meanwhile, Jordan's King Abdullah and former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad
Allawi report Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Ayman al Zawahiri, al
Qaida's number two, and Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaida chieftain in
Iraq, years before the war started.
Newsweek rushed to print Michael Isikoff's poorly sourced charge of Koran
abuse, but spiked his well sourced report on President Clinton's affair with
Monica Lewinsky, permitting Matt Drudge to scoop him.
Charges that President Bush neglected his Air National Guard duties were
given massive publicity, despite the fact they were based on the word of a
single deranged man with a grudge, who was not in a position to have
firsthand knowledge. Yet charges by most of the officers who served with
him that John Kerry lied about his service in Vietnam were given short
shrift.
Abuse at Abu Ghraib prison — where no one was killed or even hurt — was
given massive attention; Saddam's mass graves precious little.
The news media's double standard is clear: No evidence is required to
publicize charges against Republicans or American soldiers. No amount of
evidence is sufficient to publicize charges against Democrats, or America's
enemies.
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© 2005, Jack Kelly |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
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