RalphSpeak

Over the past year or two, perhaps you have heard stories out of Iraq that:

• Marines fired on and killed peaceful Iraqi protesters,
• Americans shot a 4-year-old Iraqi girl in the head,
• A tractor-trailer was filled with the bodies of civilian men, women and children killed by American artillery?

These stories, and others like them, have been reported by the Associated Press, printed in nationwide publications such as Vanity Fair and USA Today, and repeated in numerous broadcast reports. The bearer of these stories, former Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, has spoken at colleges and universities including Cornell and Syracuse. And earlier this year, auspiciously enough, Mr. Massey won a seat on Cindy Sheehan's anti-war tour bus.

There's one itsy-bitsy teenie weenie thing wrong with all this, though. You see, no one ever lifted a finger, nor a phone, to corroborate Mr. Massey's tales -- until now.

Kudos to journalist Ron Harris of the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch for being the first to ask --

Is Jimmy Massey telling the truth about Iraq?

News organizations worldwide published or broadcast Massey's claims without any corroboration and in most cases without investigation. Outside of the Marines, almost no one has seriously questioned whether Massey ... was telling the truth.

He wasn't.

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey's own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

Then, in an all too candid side-bar piece, Ron Harris continues with --

Why did the press swallow Massey's stories? [emphasis added]

Media outlets throughout the world have reported Jimmy Massey's claims of war crimes, frequently without ever seeking to verify them.

For instance, no one ever called any of the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's battalion to ask him or her about his claims.

The Associated Press, which serves more than 8,500 newspaper, radio and television stations worldwide, wrote three stories about Massey, including an interview with him in October about his new book [published in France].

But none of the AP reporters ever called Ravi Nessman, an Associated Press reporter who was embedded with Massey's unit. Nessman wrote more than 30 stories about the unit from the beginning of the war until April 15, after Baghdad had fallen.

Jack Stokes, a spokesman for the AP, said he didn't know why the reporters didn't talk to Nessman, nor could he explain why the AP ran stories without seeking a response from the Marine Corps. The organization [AP] also refused to allow Nessman to be interviewed for this story.

...

Rex Smith, editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, said he thought the newspaper's story about Massey could have "benefited from some additional reporting." But he didn't necessarily see anything particularly at odds with standard journalism practices.

The paper printed a story in which Massey reportedly told an audience how he and other Marines killed peaceful demonstrators. There was no response from the Marine Corps or any other evidence to back Massey's claims.

Smith said that, unfortunately, that is the nature of the newspaper business.

"You could take any day's newspaper and probably pick out a half dozen or more stories that ought to be subjected to a more rigorous truth test," he said.

"Yes, it would have been much better if we had the other side. But all I'm saying is that this is unfortunately something that happens every day in our newspapers and with practically every story on television."

One must credit Mr. Smith for his candor. It is a daily "fact of life" that false but grand accusations often get broad publication. Such is the unintended consequence of doing business in the real world -- the "collateral damage" of wartime journalism, so to speak.

Still, it seems cavalier. Watching the media's performance as this war unfolds, with my own modern advantage of internet and blogosphere, I am gaining a new appreciation for the Sedition Act of 1918 -- not for its appeal, but for the frustration that brought it about.

A salient in the Islamofascist strategy against the West [This, BTW, is a reiteration of some pretty classical stuff.] is to pit radical against reactionary; to provoke radical outrage from the left while fostering over-reactive repression from the right; and so flex and vex our society that it might be more easily weakened, divided, infected, and ingested. [Ongoing exempli gratia, the Paris riots.] Sloppy journalism, facile dissent, and the mass of "useful idiots" all play to the enemy's hand.

[NB -- There is evidence (some cryptic mention of a 1917 Cyrillic Selectric...?) that the usual credit identifying Lenin as originator of the term "useful idiots" is, while conceptually accurate, historically false.]

Criticism put openly and in good faith might briefly hearten the enemy, but can yet prompt and enable important corrections and improvements. [E.g., the armored Humvee issue from a few months back.]

Genuine and honorable pacifism, though pinched were conscience meets reality, serves through the dark storm to keep lit the beacon to peace -- and sanity.

But bogus defamation intends demoralization as means to capitulation and defeat. Treating the self-absorbed to moments of their own moral grandeur, it is the recreational drug of choice for profane, disloyal, and obtuse cowards -- the enemy's vanguard from the left of "useful idiots."

[The enemy's vanguard of "useful idiots" from the right is worthy of its own post.]

That we must put up with the ranks of "useful idiots" in our midst may be another one of those bummer "facts of life," but that doesn't mean we can't argue against it, encourage individual defections, and so erode the rascal faction to the nether side of negligibility.

"Hey... Useful idiot! You LIKE being stuck on stupid?" probably not your best choice in opening lines, however. (Just a thought.)

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Tip of the hat to Michelle Malkin: An Anti-War Smear Artist Exposed

Keywords: media, Massey, Jimmy Massey, war crime