Can We Get Some Real Journalists Out There?

Well done, New York Times.

It was a dramatic front-page story to match an infamous photo: the chilling shot of an Abu Ghraib prisoner, hooded, standing on a box, electrical wires attached to his outstretched arms.

He is Ali Shalal Qaissi, the New York Times said last Saturday, and the Iraqi told the paper that his wounds are still raw.

But after questions were raised by the online magazine Salon, the Times acknowledged last night that the story was flat wrong. The prisoner in the photograph was not Qaissi, who has belatedly admitted that to the newspaper.

“The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi’s insistence that he was the man in the photograph” and “should have been more persistent in seeking comment from the military,” the paper said in an editor’s note.

In other words, the paper took the word of a former Saddam Hussein lackey and gave the military short shrift.

Or, if you prefer, the Times decided to run with a shoddy story that, not very concidentally, managed to make the US Military and the Bush Administration look like terrible villains and gave our war effort yet another shot to the guts.

Or, you know, it was all an honest mistake. Folks make them all the time. Heck, the Times is getting so good at them that they have the boilerplate apology pre-loaded as a macro in their word-processing programs.

This kind of stuff is almost beyond parody. While the MSM most recently turned itself into knots slamming bloggers for doing cut and paste jobs on Wal*Mart press releases, it’s most venerated newswpaper has again run with a complete cock-and-bull story. It really does get tiring hearing the folks in the big important news rooms lecture us peons about journalistic ethics while they don’t even bother to make sure their hatchet jobs against the military and the administration get even a thin coat of competent journalism.

I really have had it with these folks. They’ve managed to take an honorable, even noble, profession, and besmirch it so badly that I think better of telemarketers than I do most members of the MSM (and certainly better than anyone running the Times).

What bothers me the most is that we’re fighting a war right now. We need real, honest to God journalists out there reporting on this war. We need brave folks backed with the resources and reach of the New York Times out there showing us and telling us what’s actually happening in the war – all of it. We need journalists out there to bear witness at these battles like Ernie Pyle bore witness all over the Pacific. Instead, we get junk like that Times article.

How incredibly sad.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media.