Thursday, March 27, 2008
Compare and Contrast
A reporter for the LA Times gets duped by forged documents about the killing of a Hip-Hop star 14 years ago and then he and his editor write:
"In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job," Philips said in a statement Wednesday. "I'm sorry."But the reporter who was the single most culpable media dupe in hyping the non-existent Iraqi WMD threat in 2002 and 2003, reporting absolutely false information passed to her by criminal Iraqi exiles says mealy mouthed things like:
In his statement, Duvoisin added: "We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck's. I deeply regret that we let our readers down."
Although Ms Miller apologised for the intelligence being incorrect she defended her journalism saying she was right to publish and had done everything she could to verify the facts. She said: "I'm deeply sorry our intelligence community got it wrong.Ain't society's priorities grand? ¶ 10:47 AM
"I am deeply sorry that the President was given a national intelligence estimate which concluded that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and a active weapons programme."
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Maybe it has less to do with priorities, and more to do with the fact that the rap-related documents came from a single source -- a conman in prison -- were demonstrably written on his prison-supplied typewriter, and were readily falsifiable by a number of means, which the reporter neglected to check.
Yeah, as I heard more about the story throughout yesterday, it certainly seem that Phillips had screwed up, but I remain bitter that society seems to care more about Tupac than about hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and 4000 dead Americans.
All things being equal, which they obviously are not, Judith Miller's incompetence was far more gross than Phillips. She not only printed Chalabi's dog and pony show, she advocated for him. With the dust settled, it is obvious that there was a ton of contradictory evidence to the INC's claims and Miller not only knew about it, she openly dismissed it.
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All things being equal, which they obviously are not, Judith Miller's incompetence was far more gross than Phillips. She not only printed Chalabi's dog and pony show, she advocated for him. With the dust settled, it is obvious that there was a ton of contradictory evidence to the INC's claims and Miller not only knew about it, she openly dismissed it.
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