Our news media has become an utter failure in providing the American public with information on which to base decisions.  Its behavior, by and large, has lately been rather despicable in reporting fabricated information as fact, treating our official sources as less authoritative than sources from sworn enemies, and distributing obviously staged and/or doctored news photographs.

A recent example is the death of Taliban senior commander Akhtar Mohammad Osmani who was reported by our official government sources to have been killed by a US aircraft after having been tracked for some period of time and engaged in a remote area where collateral injuries would be unlikely.  Instead, our media reported the Taliban's own version that it was someone else who had been killed mentioning our official sources in a skeptical tone with the implication that we had missed our target and struck someone else.  This was after our officials stated that they were quite sure and only released the information after they had themselves confirmed it.

Recently the Associated Press has been caught publishing stories that  apparently never happened from a source who apparently doesn't exist.  Other bloggers on the story ( I learned of it from reading Curt's articles at floppingaces.net ) have determined that there were some 61 published articles using this source who has still not been produced.   The response by the Associated Press to date has been to go into their archives, change the articles to make it appear as if they never reported those things, attack the bloggers that called them on it, and going forward have been simply citing no sources at all for their information. 

Reuters and AP were caught distributing obviously staged photojournalism during the recent conflict in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel.  One of Reuters' photographers was caught doctoring photographs to make them appear more dramatic than they actually were.

All of this appears to stem from two different causes.  First, the wire services are creating a market for sensational journalism by repeating it without verification.  A "stringer" can get published if dramatic stories of lurid incidents with high casualty counts are brought in.  No attempt is apparently made to confirm these stories, and sources are not followed up on or named. Enterprizing locals are competing with each other to get their stuff published and reap the economic benefit.  The other shoe is an apparent desire by the press to show anything our government does in a bad light.  Coupled, these two things result in an evil synergy that result in inflated reporting of casualties and incidents to the point where nothing they publish can be believed on the face of it.

Members of our journalism trade have abused a trust that was gained during the Watergate era when they exposed wrongdoing by powerful people in government.  They have now resorted to publishing anything negative that fits an apparent political agenda regardless of the accuracy of it.  As the major wire services are caught more often, the impact of their reporting lessens to the point of being a mockery of journalism.  They are going to find their influence waning, their stories no longer being a valid reference, and people turning to alternative sources for information.  Being "truthy" won't work, they must be truthful.

A CENTCOM source recently told a blogger by email that the daily body counts reported on the wire services for bodies found about Baghdad, Iraq are about double the number they can confirm from their sources.  One would think CENTCOM has access to their own sources such as security forces and medical response teams in addition to Iraqi ministries including Defense and Interior.  But somehow the wire services anonymous sources are consistently double official sources and are never named so that these claims can be followed up on.  Also, the location of the various finds are never produced, only the magical daily aggregate count is ever reported.  Where did it come from?  Who knows.

The most telling action by the wire services has been their patronizing behavior toward anyone who would dare question their veracity.  That might work once.  But as their reporting is exposed as being inaccurate, their browbeating of critics begins to be seen in a different light.  They have become the very kind of monster they would have wanted to bring down in the 1970's.  They are covering up lies, they are attempting to intimidate and ridicule investigators into their behavior, they are becoming evil.

This is not the first time the media has attempted to go back in time and edit archives to cover up inaccurate reporting.  I documented a case of this by the ABC News blog The Blotter earlier this year.  Who knows what they are editing even now.  Will future historians researching events in the future find an entirely different version of history that what actually transpired?  The beauty of hard copy on microfilm is that it can not be changed at some later point in time to pretend it said something different.  The problem with electronic media archives is that they can be.  Our media outlets have already been caught changing these archives. All we are now wondering about is to what degree they will do it in the future.  The trust is gone, the media have squandered it.  I hope that some day they manage to get it back but that will take a very rare commodity in today's culture ... integrity.  Integrity is what you do when nobody is looking.  Our news media has shown us that they are lacking in this trait.

It is not the job of the journalist to make the world a better place though their work.  It is their job to reflect the world as it is.  They should not paint a picture of what they would want us to see, they should show us what is beyond our horizon as accurately as possible because once they are caught telling us lies, we may never trust them again.

Journalists and journalism teachers, you have a tough job ahead.  Convince us that you can tell the straight truth.  Then maybe your work will have more impact.  Right now I would say it is going in the opposite direction.

It appears that a new political reality is taking shape in Iraq that could be a way forward out of the current violent struggle between factional militias.  Over the past few weeks, an alliance of more moderate political groups spanning the entire nation of Iraq to include Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds has taken shape.  This group has apparently offered to put its backing behind Iraqi President Maliki so that he may address the problem of the radical militias without losing support in the Iraqi assembly.

The current Iraqi government was beset with two realities that prevented it from taking action against these radical militias.  First there was a problem with political alliances.  Shiites could only maintain their majority as a voting block in the assembly if they remained together.  A combined Kurdish/Sunni alliance could dominate if there was any fracture of the Shiite block.  Also, all sides wanted a government that was not a threat to them.  As such the government was designed to be weak so as to pose no threat.  Should the government move against any militant faction, that faction could pull out of their political alliance and Maliki's support in the assembly could be toppled.

What has now appeared is an alliance that transcends religious or ethnic factions.  Apparently the desire to stop the violence is now a higher priority than ethnic or religious concerns.  Rather than call for the ouster of Maliki, which would throw the government into turmoil for weeks or possibly even months, they have thrown their backing behind him and are encouraging him to take action with promises of their support provided some of their own conditions are met.

What is most interesting is that top Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani is apparently supportive of this direction.  His blessing would pave the way for wide Shiite acceptance of this plan and the development of a pan-Iraqi alliance to fight the militias.  In particular, it makes moot any threats people such as Moktada al Sadr might make to derail this opportunity.  In fact, this entire alliance seems designed to thwart just the kind of action that al Sadr has threatened with his walkout of the assembly some three weeks ago. 

In the meantime, President Bush has met with other political leaders of this alliance who have recently traveled to Washington to present their views on this plan.  The message is simple and clear.  The Iraqis have grown tired of the violence being waged by Iraqis on Iraqis and have finally found the will to form the political backing needed for a solution.  al Sadr is now on notice as his position is considerably weaker if he chooses to remain on the wrong side of this alliance. 

In fact, some inkling of how important al Sadr sees these events is reflected in reporting by the AP today where the notion of a one month unilateral ceasefire by his Mahdi Army is being floated.  al Sadr is set to meet soon with delegates from this alliance followed shortly thereafter by a meeting with Ayatollah Sistani.  The New York Times reports in an article dated December 20, 2006 that the door for Shiite participation in this alliance is to be initially open very wide to allow maximum initial participation.  As time passes, this door is expected to begin closing.  The alliance appears to have enough votes already to moot any antics by al Sadr so his room for any serious derailing manoeuvres is limited.  In other words, the specter of irrelevance is before him and if he wishes to remain a political force within the government, he needs to bring his militia under control.

This is the first post-election (Iraqi election, that is) good news I have seen and bold steps such as these are what is needed to bring peace to Iraq.  The Iraqis seem to have realized what we had been trying to tell them all along.  They have had the power to put an end to this internal violence, they simply needed the will to do so.  When if finally became obvious that the situation was not going to sort itself out and that hundreds of Iraqis were dying every month in the sectarian strife, the Iraqis have appeared, so far, to show a desire to rise above sectarian and religious differences, band together, and face the toublemakers.  And they are facing their troublemakers with an olive branch in one hand and a sword in the other.  It is up to them to choose which they want.

I wouldn't say it is a new dawn in Iraq just yet, but it does appear that I can see the first brightening of the early twilight on the horizon.

Now that 2006 has nearly come to a close, I wanted to take a moment to share what I think has been the most important story of the year.  That would be the major wire services being caught red-handed falsifying the news. From the wire services running doctored and staged news photos, false captioning, to publishing of news reports of deliberately inflated casualty counts and in some cases events that never happened, the media has been exposed due to people questioning what we are being fed.  The Internet has allowed us to access expertise of millions of other people.  What one person might have noticed in the past can now be shared and verified by a concerned public in seconds.

When the wire services published photos of the same person before several different buildings in pictures transmitted days apart, people noticed.  When pictures contained obvious doctoring to make the pictures appear worse than they really were, people noticed.  When it became obvious to some that pictures were being staged, they called attention, others looked, more dug through past photos and the fraud was brought to light.

I was greatly saddened by the death of our journalistic ethic in this country until I realized that it hasn't died, it has simply moved.  Where the major media outlets are now engaged in partisan political propaganda, the real ethical reporting seems to have moved to the blogs.  People are calling the major media on their fabrications.  They are making the obvious propaganda transparent.

I agree with Time magazine's selection of Person Of The Year.

Well done, everyone.  Now let's get back to work!

I haven't blogged here in a while.  But since we have been voted Person Of The Year by Time, I just thought I would take a moment to thank Al Gore for inventing the Internet.