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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Jan. 31, 2007 / 12 Shevat, 5767

A CBS story “too important to ignore”

By Michelle Malkin


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Let us contemplate some wisdom from a media ethics expert quoted by The New York Times this week:


"To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. 'If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,' said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts."


No, he wasn't talking about the Associated Press' (and the Washington Post's and the Los Angeles Times' and the New York Times') anonymous stringers relying on unnamed and unreliable sources reporting (or rather, rumor-mongering) on the war in Iraq.


No, he wasn't talking about the anonymous reporter identified only as "an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Najaf" in three stories just this week, which quoted various unnamed Iraqi clerics, residents and officials.


No, Professor Whitehead was talking about the swiftly and widely discredited InsightMag.com story about Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., attending a madrassa as a child. Fox News Channel (for which I am a contributor — see, transparency's not so hard) took a pounding for picking up the inaccurate story. The liberal media pile-on continues despite the network's immediate acknowledgement of error in repeating the false charges and despite the fact that Fox didn't originate the story.


Unlike, say, CBS News, Dan Rather and the faked National Guard memos.


Meanwhile, CBS News has another potential controversy on its hands involving unnamed sources that Professor Whitehead and The New York Times won't get around to flogging. On the left-wing MediaChannel.org website, supporters of CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan published a mass e-mail she had sent out asking for "help." She had filed a report on recent Iraqi and U.S. troop action along Baghdad's Haifa Street, but complained that it "only appeared on our CBS website and was not aired on CBS. It is a story that is largely being ignored." The report featured a masked "Haifa Street resident" who "blamed the fighting on the U.S." A CBS spokesman told BroadcastingCable.com that the story, which included footage of sprawled corpses of men in Iraqi Army uniforms, had been deemed "too graphic for an evening news audience."


This didn't mollify the correspondent-turned-activist, who asked her friends to send CBS a message that her piece wasn't "too gruesome to air, but rather too important to ignore." Logan has done much good work on the ground in Iraq, but her extra-curricular lobbying was a bit much even for some of her colleagues. "I think anything that happens internally should stay internal," the network's spokesman told BroadcastingCable.com.


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What does deserve external airing, however, are Logan's glaring omissions from her online piece. Nibras Kazimi, a Hudson Institute scholar and blogger at Talisman Gate (talismangate.blogspot.com), took a close look at Logan's Jan. 18 report and recognized the grainy corpse footage "obtained by CBS." He says it matched an eight-minute video published online Jan. 7 by an al Qaeda propaganda arm under the title "Some of the Casualties of the Heretics in Haifa Street After Sunday's Fighting, January 7, 2007, in Baghdad." Indeed, many of the video images are identical.


At the time, Kazimi notes, "the Iraqi military claimed that some of its soldiers were cornered on Haifa Street and killed after running out of ammunition. This incident set off the subsequent battles there. Al-Qaeda also released written statements at the time taking credit for the initial phase of fighting. . . . The footage 'obtained by CBS' is identical to that put out by Al-Qaeda. But Logan makes no mention of Al-Qaeda's video and does not address the implication that the footage she used was off an Al-Qaeda video. And if it's not off the Al-Qaeda video, then how did she get footage identical to the one used by Al-Qaeda? This needs to be explained."


But "the most damning indication of journalistic incompetence," Kazimi blogs, is that "Logan makes no mention about the affiliation of these insurgents fighting on Haifa Street. Not even the slightest mention is made that al Qaeda is taking credit for the fighting there. On the contrary, the audience is treated to a blanket accusation by an anonymous civilian (wearing a headdress in the insurgent manner) denouncing the Americans and the destruction they've brought to bear on Haifa Street."


Was Logan a willing tool or an ignorant fool? Either way, the story is — as she says herself — "too important to ignore."

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Comment on JWR contributor Michelle Malkin's column by clicking here.


Michelle Malkin Archives


MICHELLE'S LATEST:

In Unhinged: Liberals Gone Wild

Un·hinged


adj : affected with madness or insanity; [syn: brainsick, crazy, demented, distracted, disturbed, mad, sick, unbalanced]
— The American Heritage Dictionary

*** Warning: Unhinged liberals are hazardous to the nation's health.

They're slashing your tires. Burning your lawns. Heaving pies at Republican pundits. Hurling racist epithets at minority conservatives. Nursing nutty conspiracy theories. And pining publicly for the murder of President Bush.

And they call us crazy?

In In Unhinged: Liberals Gone Wild, Michelle Malkin plays conservative Margaret Mead to the alien political creatures of the American Left. With uproarious detail and rollicking reportage, Malkin chronicles the bizarre world of leftists gone mad in their natural habitats: the mainstream media, academia, Hollywood, and Washington.

Unhinged unmasks liberals who've completely abandoned rationality and reality. They're taking chainsaws and bayonets to campaign signs. Running down political opponents with their cars. Setting fire to political opponents in effigy. Defacing war memorials. Swiping yellow ribbons off cars. And supporting the fragging of American troops.

In Unhinged, you'll meet:

- The Top 10 Unhinged Leftists, Celebrities, Media Liberals, and Politicians. - The Pennsylvania Democrat who repeatedly screamed "faggot" at his Republican opponents on the Senate floor. - The Florida Democrat who tried to run down former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris with his Cadillac. - The Democrat congressman who claimed the capture of Saddam Hussein was staged by GOP operatives to help the Bush re-election campaign. - The veteran newsman who claimed that Bush advisor Karl Rove and Osama bin Laden are working hand-in-hand to help the Republican Party. - And hundreds more unhinged liberals gone wild!

With wit, wisdom, and a bullet-proof vest, Michelle Malkin ruthlessly and raucously skewers the myths of liberal tolerance, peace, and civility. Unhinged shows how conservatives are driving their opponents mad. The good news for liberals? Self-help starts here.

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