Michelle Malkin fiddles while Baghdad burns

By Eric Boehlert
Created Dec 12 2006 - 9:10am

Warbloggers endured a bleak November, watching their political heroes suffer
the loss of both houses of Congress, while President Bush's approval ratings
fell toward Nixonian levels, the mainstream media finally conceded the
battle for Iraq had broken down into a civil war, and even war architect
Donald Rumsfeld was tossed overboard. Everything warbloggers had championed
over the past five years -- waging war with Islamists and creating a
permanent Republican majority inside the Beltway -- came undone, and the
chronically incorrect warbloggers, angry ideologues who make Sean Hannity
look like a man of reason, slipped into the realm of the laughingstock [0].

But then on November 24, a ray of hope appeared, a much-needed spark that
self-anointed war scribes rallied around to lift their spirits. Amidst the
carnage inside Iraq and the political collapse at home, warbloggers
identified America's most treacherous enemy -- a stringer for the Associated
Press.

In a November 24 dispatch [0], the global news giant, quoting Iraqi police
Capt. Jamil Hussein, reported that Shiite militiamen had "grabbed six Sunnis
as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned
them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene." Warbloggers were
skeptical of the chilling report, in part because no other news
organizations could confirm the horrific event. The U.S. Central Command's
communications machine then jumped in, issuing a statement [0] that it could
not corroborate the killings and that Hussein was not a Baghdad police
captain, and even if he were, somebody of his rank was not authorized to
speak to the press. Central Command then filed an official complaint with
the AP and demanded [0] a retraction.

The AP stood by its story [0], though, calling CENTCOM's allegations
"ludicrous" and noting that Hussein had been providing AP reporters with
reliable information for months. The AP also didn't think much of CENTCOM's
suggestion that reporters only quote people found on the government's
approved list of sources.

For the record, along with Hussein, the AP based its Burned Alive reporting
[0] on an account from Imad al-Hashimi, a Sunni elder who told Al-Arabiya
television about the killings. (He later recanted his story after being
visited by a representative of the defense minister.) The AP also spoke to
three independent eyewitnesses (two shopkeepers and a physician) and
confirmed [0] the story with hospital and morgue workers. Nonetheless,
CENTCOM raised doubts about Hussein, so warbloggers, hearing a reassuring
narrative they loved, pronounced the AP guilty of manufacturing news and
quickly referred to Hussein as a "fake policeman [0]" and to the Burned
Alive story as a "fairy tale [0]."

By inflating the disputed incident into a monumentally important press
story, warbloggers, who have excitedly pounded the story for weeks,
convinced themselves that blame for the United States' emerging defeat in
Iraq lay squarely at the feet of the press. Specifically, warbloggers claim
that American journalists, too cowardly to go get the news themselves, are
relying on local Iraqi news stringers who have obvious sympathies for
terrorists and who purposefully push propaganda into the news stream -- the
way Hussein did with the Burned Alive story -- to create the illusion of
turmoil. Warbloggers, who have virtually no serious journalism experience
among them, announced that what's coming out of Iraq today is not news at
all, but simply terrorist press releases -- "a pack of lies" -- regurgitated
by reporters (or "traitors [0]") who want to see the insurgents succeed.

"[M]any in the American media ... have a vested interest in exaggerating the
violence as much as possible," announced [0] warblogger Michelle Malkin,
whose reassuring analysis was echoed by warbloggers such as the Anchoress,
Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Flopping Aces, Instapundit, Redstate,
The Belmont Club, Wizbang, and Pajamas Media, among others. Fox News, the
New York Post, The Examiner of the Washington, D.C., area, and National
Review Online also gave the story attention.

Should the AP be held responsible for its reporting, and should the global
news agency be diligent about whom it hires inside Iraq? Of course. And
there should be hell to pay if it's proven any news events were
manufactured. But warbloggers aren't interested in an honest, factual debate
about a single instance of journalistic accountability. And they're not
really interested in the specifics of the Burned Alive story. They're
interested in wide-ranging conspiracy theories and silencing skeptical
voices.

As American Prospect blogger Greg Sargent noted [0], "Malkin and her
compadres are trying to accomplish one thing, and one thing only: They want
to staunch the flow of images back to America of President Bush's disastrous
war in Iraq." Indeed, censorship via intimidation -- not authentic media
criticism -- has always been atop the warbloggers' agenda. (Their main beef
with the press is that it exists.)

It should be noted that Malkin's breathless excitement over the AP story
nearly matches the enthusiasm she used to spread online smears about the
press in the spring of 2005 during the Terri Schiavo right-to-die
controversy. That's when Malkin backed the novel conspiracy theory that
press reports about how congressional Republicans had drafted a
talking-points memo in order to properly spin the Schiavo story were all
wrong. In fact, according to Malkin's fact-free analysis [0], an unknown
Democratic operative had concocted the phony GOP talking-points memo and
duped the media in order to make Republicans look bad. Wrong [0].

Ignoring the carnage

For today's right-wing warbloggers, whose contempt for journalists is
matched only by their unbridled hatred of Arabs and Muslims, the AP
kerfuffle represented a perfect solution that, at least temporarily, lifted
their November blues. By early this month, they had dubbed the scandal
"Jamilgate," with Malkin referring [0] to the AP as "The Associated (with
terrorists) Press." (Get it?)

Keep in mind that in the seven days surrounding the Burned Alive story,
hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis were killed in sectarian violence. Here's a
very small sampling, via Reuters, of the bloodshed that flowed around the
time of the Burned Alive dispatch:

a.. Mosul -- Police said they recovered 14 bodies, including three women,
in different areas of Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad. [November
22]
b.. Baghdad -- Up to six car bombs killed 133 people in a Shi'ite militia
stronghold in Baghdad and a further 201 people were wounded, police said.
[November 23]
c.. Baghdad -- Baghdad police recovered 30 unidentified bodies around the
capital in the 24 hours to late Friday, an Interior Ministry source said.
[November 24]
d.. Baghdad -- Baghdad police retrieved 30 bodies of victims of violence
on Friday and 17 on Saturday, an Interior Ministry source said. [November
25]
e.. Baquba -- Police in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, found
the bodies of 25 people, including seven teenagers blindfolded and each with
a single gunshot wound to the head, in various parts of Baquba in the past
24 hours, police said. [November 26]
f.. Baghdad -- Baghdad police retrieved 39 bodies in the 24 hours to
Monday evening. [November 27]
To date, warbloggers have not raised serious questions about any of those
slayings or the reporting surrounding them. Yet viewing Iraq through the
soda straw that is the Burned Alive story, they insist the press, thanks to
its pro-terrorist sympathies, is creating the illusion of "chaos" in Iraq.

Whereas readers like you and me might see a completely illogical obsession
with the Burned Alive story, given the statistical fact that the Iraqi civil
war [0] will likely claim six more victims within the next hour, for the
warbloggers the half-dozen fatalities represent something much more
important -- an exit strategy, a way out of their own man-made disaster that
is Iraq. Because warbloggers think they can claim the whole Iraq fiasco was
the media's fault, that the press did the terrorists' bidding, spread their
propaganda, turned Americans against their fighting sons and daughters, and
ruined what would have otherwise been a brilliant Bush foreign policy
maneuver to spread Western-style democracy throughout a troubled part of the
world.

In other words, the press lost the war. Period. And worse, the press lost
the war through phony, biased reporting. My hunch is the Burned Alive
excitement revolves around the fact warbloggers see an opening to try to
raise doubts about, and even dismiss [0], all the Iraq reporting. "In short,
the AP has been relying on a bogus source for much of its reporting on Shia
violence against Sunnis since at least April," right-wing blogger Jeff
Goldstein wrote [0] at Protein Wisdom.

Warblogger Confederate Yankee went one better. Leaning heavily on the CBS
Memogate analogy from the 2004 election, the warblogger insisted [0] Jamil
Hussein was just one of an army of "phony" sources the AP had been using to
manufacture fake reports inside Iraq. "Quite literally, almost all AP
reporting from Iraq not verified from reporters of other news organizations
is now suspect. ... 'Jamilgate' means the Associated Press may have been
delivering news of questionable accuracy to one billion people a day for two
years or more." [Emphasis in original.]

Warning: Confederate Yankee is the same warblogger who recently posted [0] a
Reuters photo of an elderly Iraqi woman wrapped in a headscarf and crying
beside a coffin. Confederate Yankee sensed foul play and claimed [0] the
picture had been mischievously doctored by the wire service because the
Iraqi woman's face was actually George Bush's mug superimposed onto the
picture. I kid you not.

Unhinged

It's clear warbloggers long ago passed the breaking point in terms of Iraq.
But to see them recoil and lash out with such unhinged and oddly personal
hatred for the press is shocking. While the rest of the real world debates
serious options to curtail the losses in Iraq, warbloggers obsess over
treacherous journalists who are endangering U.S. forces. At least according
to warblogger Anchoress [0]: "I wonder how many of our troops are being
further endangered by the fakery we're discovering here? I wonder how many
of their deaths in the coming weeks will be due to this sort of stuff? ...
The press is literally trying to not simply destroy the man [Bush] but take
down his government and surrender a military action that is important to the
survival of our identity."

Did you get that? The Associated Press is killing U.S. soldiers, destroying
the presidency, taking down the American government, and surrendering its
national security. Who knew?

Michael Novak, in what may go down as The Weekly Standard's loopiest Iraq
essay [0] ever (no small task), insisted that "[t]o achieve this victory
over America, it is not even necessary to create actual 'chaos,' but only
its appearance." (Love the quotation marks around chaos, as if it's in
doubt.) Adopting the voice of an insurgent, Novak announced, "What we have
discovered in Iraq is the weakest link in the ability of the United States
to sustain military operations overseas. That link is the U.S. media. They
are Islamists' best friends. ... Without qualm or fear, therefore, they do
our bidding day after day. Willingly, gleefully, with much
self-congratulation, they pump our storyline into the bloodstream of the
Western public."

To watch warbloggers taunt journalists for being cowards is also unsettling.
Curt at Flopping Aces wrote [0]: "If the reporters would leave their comfy
hotel rooms and actually go out and survey the scenes themselves then I am
sure we would get a completely different picture." Honestly, is there any
irony sharper than members of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, blogging
comfortably from their air-conditioned stateside offices while obsessively
googling AP dispatches in search of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that
don't meet the right-wing standard of excellence, lecturing on-the-ground
news reporters about the need to witness the Iraq conflict up close? (Here's
the Crooks and Liar video [0] of neocon columnist Mark Steyn pretty much
calling reporters sissies for being "hunkered down" in the Green Zone and
not reporting that "most of the schools in Iraq are open, most of the
hospitals in Iraq are open.")

The notion is demented, but given their wild online rants, I don't think
it's out of bounds to suggest that warbloggers want journalists to venture
into exceedingly dangerous sections of Iraq because warbloggers want
journalists to get killed. That's how deep their hatred for the press runs.
(Since March 2003, 126 members of the media [0] -- reporters and their
support staff -- have been killed in Iraq.) Also, by publicly demanding the
AP "produce" Capt. Hussein -- for him to hold some sort of a press
conference and announce his presence at a time when Iraqi police officers
are being targeted daily for assassination -- indicates that warbloggers
don't much care whether Hussein lives or dies either, as long as they can
peddle their anti-media rants.

The truth is that most administration officials, as well as most adults on
Capitol Hill, long ago abandoned the meme that the press simply wasn't
reporting all the "good news" from Iraq and that Americans were being denied
the torrent of feel-good stories blossoming from Basra to Mosul. But not the
warbloggers. As the situation in Iraq grows more dire, they simply cling
tighter to their Hail Mary claim that American reporters are to blame for a
foreign policy debacle.

Of course, the only way the Iraq press hoax can sustain itself is if the
entire American media infrastructure is in on it. On that, warbloggers are
clear; none of the mainstream media can be trusted. Nobody is telling the
truth about Iraq and its non-civil war.

Slight problem with that conspiracy theory: Why haven't openly conservative
news outlets like the New York Post and The Washington Times

been telling a drastically different story about Iraq? Why haven't they
flooded the airwaves and news pages with the obvious "good news" stories the
mainstream media won't touch because of their political bias? If the press
(not to mention the bipartisan Iraq Study Group) is making up this dark
narrative about "chaos" inside Iraq, then why, according to the Nexis
electronic database, has The Washington Times published nearly 300 columns
and articles in the past two years that contained both "Iraq" and "chaos"?
And why did the New York Post on November 27 report [0] that Iraq's prime
minister was under increasing pressure to "stem the chaos in his country"?
Are The Washington Times and the New York Post now part of the far-reaching
liberal media cover-up, too?

* * *

A footnote: It's odd that warbloggers have expended an enormous amount of
time and energy trying to pick apart a single source from a single,
relatively brief AP dispatch, arguing that the misleading information in
that article somehow calls into question all of the Iraq reporting, yet
warbloggers have been relatively silent about the recent string of
book-length critiques of the war. I'm thinking in particular about Thomas
Ricks' excellent book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq [0]
(Penguin Press, July 2006), which, in its first 100 pages, tells readers all
they need to know about the botched war. Warbloggers either don't read
books, or are so completely overwhelmed by the definitive evidence produced
in a book like Fiasco, which relies heavily on sources from within the U.S.
military to paint its convincing picture of Bush administration
incompetence, that warbloggers simply have no choice but to turn away and
focus their attention on evil AP stringers.
_______

About author A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former
senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press
Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at
eboehlert@aol.com [1]

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson