FOLLOWING UP ON THE LACK OF SCARE QUOTES

Now that it's a three-day weekend and I'm procrastinating on projects with actual deadlines, and this being the deadliest day in Iraq since the elections, I figured it was the best moment to follow up on this post and see if anybody else had noted or corrected the AP's Maggie Michael (not Michaels, as I originally had it) for writing this paragraph:

The U.S. military also reported Wednesday that a U.S. soldier assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action Tuesday in western Iraq. In addition, the bodies of eight Iraqis described as collaborators with U.S. forces were found in a desert area north of Baghdad.

Emphasis mine, of course. I found this at the New York Times' website, and while that story is no longer available, versions featuring the same careless repetition of propaganda are widely available on other newspaper sites. Oddly, the right-wing New York Post (currently the fourth result at the above link) edited the offending sentence but didn't remove the terrorist spin. The right-er Washington Times didn't touch it at all.

Searching Google as well as Nexis I could find no example of a newspaper or website removing the line, but it's always possible one did.

Meanwhile, my friend and milblogger Bryan from the E-R-C argued in a comment to my previous post that we shouldn't "place the onus of carelessness on one reporter's shoulders alone":

It's a journalist's job to get to the truth of things. Ideally this involves cutting through the rhetoric employed by the various players in the game of impression management that surrounds any public event, most especially armed violence. ... These interested parties time events and successions to events in such a manner as to deliberately confound the media's ability to parse through spun information before moving to the next news item.

My account, according to Bryan, "seems a cavalier dismissal of the extent of the problem." Nonsense. I made my assertion knowing full well that interested parties try to influence journalists all the time. If Maggie Michael didn't know exactly who the victims were, then she should have said their identities were yet unknown. There is no excusing what she wrote.

Another reason Ms. Michael cannot defend herself on the basis of limited knowledge is because some versions of her story, like the one available from ABC News, include more information about the murdered Iraqis:

Police found the bound, gagged bodies of eight Iraqis, mostly civilians who had worked at a U.S. military base, in shallow graves north of the Iraqi capital. All were shot in the back of the head.

And not in the next sentence or paragraph: it comes nineteen paragraphs later. Whether she filed an update later or wrote one story that others truncated, she should have known what she was doing.

It remains a possibility that this was just a case of mere carelessness, but we must also consider that this was an example of purposeful disregard.

°   °   °   °   °
Update, early morning hours, still procrastinating — We "must" consider this? Well, it's up to you. Because I wasn't sure whether this was just an isolated incident or not, I logged into Nexis and searched for the terms "Iraqi" and "collaborators" occurring within three or so so words of each other in U.S. newspapers and wires during the past 90 days. Non-hyperlinked text of the results, cut-and-pasted, is here. There were 44 instances, and while plenty of reporters/agencies used scare quotes and/or clearly attributed the usage to terrorists (many of course say "insurgents," a more frequently debated word choice — and one which I would argue is less distateful than "collaborators") I quickly noticed that at least a few did not distance themselves from the term. A reporter with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Brian Thevenot, appears at first glance to have done so more than once. On the other hand, it seems that Agence France-Presse assiduously flags the term as questionable; perhaps once working under real collaborators left an impression.

I haven't had the time to go through the whole thing, but it would seem there's something to all this. I'll dig deeper.

---

posted by WWB at 12:33 AM |