On The MSM, Again

[Annie]

Excellent article by Glenn Reynolds:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6901445/#050202

Back in April we had the Eason Jordan scandal, in which CNN turned out to have been covering up known atrocities by Saddam Hussein in exchange for access.

Then we had RatherGate, in which CBS presented bogus documents because of its overwhelming desire to hurt George W. Bush. (And we have Eason Jordan again, this time making unsubstantiated charges that American troops are trying to kill journalists.)

But in the most absurd development of all, we had a wide variety of news outlets yesterday reporting that an American soldier had been taken prisoner by Iraqi terrorists (excuse me, "insurgents"), along with the usual photo.

Er, except the photo turned out to be an "action figure" named Cody. People have been having fun with that, producing similar photographic evidence of Osama bin Laden's capture, and spoof stories with headlines like "Zarqawi quits Al Qaeda, joins C.O.B.R.A."

All in good fun, and both the terrorists -- and the sensation-hungry media who are all-to-quick to empower them by running this sort of thing -- deserve all the derision we can manage.

But it raises another question. Professional journalists are always sniffing at the Internet's amateurs, and claiming that their superior fact-checking and editorial resources produce a better product. Yet, once again, they've fallen for an obvious fraud.

And it was obvious. In fact, one reader e-mailed me this:

I did not tell him anything about the questions being raised about its authenticity when I showed my 16 year old son the picture posted at this site, he took one look and started laughing and said "that is a GI Joe doll."

Perhaps today's journalists are the kind of people whose parents didn't let them play with military toys, but this still calls into question just what we're getting from all those editors and fact-checkers. A story in today's Christian Science Monitor asks, "Are bloggers journalists?"

Perhaps we should start asking if journalists are journalists.

On the other hand, I shouldn't complain -- if media organizations hadn't been gullible enough to run with this story, I never would have gotten to read G.I. Joe's P.O.W. diaries:

As I huddle in the shoebox that will soon define the four corners of my world, my thoughts turn to my wife, Barbie; my brother, Fireman Rescue Hero; and my son, Lego Luke Skywalker. I must be strong for them.

I've had to be strong all my life. It's hard to be a poor plastic kid in a video-game world, and even harder when you're an immigrant -- I was made in China. My mother was a Chinese novelty factory and my father was a petroleum by-products distributor who just played around with my mother and then disappeared. Nobody wanted a soldier toy in Clinton's nineties, so I made my way playing minimum-wage gigs like "Thug #3" in the Hudson Hawk action figure line. But after a shameful night of drinking nail polish remover and driving a Mattel remote-control car full of underage Jem sidekicks into a telephone pole, a judge gave me a choice: an Army enlistment, or a Goodwill box.
I chose the former.

Heh. Great art often comes from tragedies. Even journalistic ones.

 

[Adam's Apple]

The MSM fall for stories like this from the terrorists because THEY WANT THEM TO BE TRUE, THEY HOPE THEY ARE TRUE. The "Internet amateurs" can spot a fraud like this in 60 seconds because they have no political agenda propelling them.