In the dozens;

“All right Mr. Associated Press. I’m ready for my close up*.”

Even Eason Jordan can’t find him.

If an Iraqi police captain by the name of Jamil Hussein exists, there is no convincing evidence of it – and that means the Associated Press has a journalistic scandal on its hands that will fester until the AP deals with it properly.
[…]
In statements, the AP insists Captain Hussein is real, insists he has been known to the AP and others for years, and insists the immolation episode occurred based on multiple eyewitnesses.
But efforts by two governments, several news organizations, and bloggers have failed to produce such evidence or proof that there is a Captain Jamil Hussein. The AP cannot or will not produce him or convincing evidence of his existence.
It is striking that no one has been able to find a family member, friend, or colleague of Captain Hussein. Nor has the AP told us who in the AP’s ranks has actually spoken with Captain Hussein. Nor has the AP quoted Captain Hussein once since the story of the disputed episode.

Previous posts.
Update – AP responds – “We didn’t read what Mr. Jordan wrote, and we’re not going to.” More at the link.

I don’t remember any over-weening coverage by big media over the firing squad demise of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu when ” video pictures of their summary trial and execution were shown on television in Romania and around the world”, back in December of 1989.

The images of their dead bodies, riddled with bullets, were broadcast and much of the unrest which continued after their deaths subsided.

So, what’s transpired in the years intervening that has prompted such distress on the part of media for the way that citizens of oppressed nations treat the dearly awaited departure of their not-so-beloved dictators?
Here is Bill Carter in the New York Times, on the hard choices facing their editors, chastising the great unwashed amateurs of the internet for their lack of journalistic… standards…

Confronted with a second, unofficial and more graphic video account of the moments leading up to the execution of Saddam Hussein, and the hanging itself, executives at television news organizations made a series of what one executive, President Steve Capus of NBC News, called “delicate editorial decisions” about what they would put on the air on Saturday night and Sunday to augment the first pictures of the execution.
The new video, almost certainly shot by a cellphone camera by one of the guards or witnesses at the execution, includes exchanges between Mr. Hussein and either the witnesses or guards leading up to the moment when the trapdoor opens and he falls. No national American television organization has thus far allowed the moment of the drop to be shown.
But the same niceties were not observed on numerous Web sites, which have posted the complete video, including the moment that Mr. Hussein, noose around his neck, falls, and a close-up of his face afterward. Some prominent sites, like Google’s video site and the conservative blog Littlegreenfootballs.com, have posted the complete cellphone coverage of the execution, including the moment Mr. Hussein falls from view.

What’s that saying?
“Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to forget to fact-check”.

Little Green Footballs is running slower than a mule on Valium this morning, apparently because of a link in this article at the New York Times that’s sending a deluge of people looking for the cellphone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution: Hard Choices Over Video of Execution.
[…]
In his haste to take a slap at the “conservative” blog LGF for not observing the same “niceties” as mainstream media, New York Times writer Bill Carter failed to notice that the “complete video” is not posted at LGF, and never has been. Elementary fact-checking, anyone? Did Carter even look at our site before writing that, or was he going for the cheap smear based on nothing more than his own fevered imagination?

h/t to Maz2, in the comments.
More – observations on CTV’s Tom Clark editorializing, also in the comments.

The journalist who wrote those words is interviewed – by radio talk host and blogger, Hugh Hewitt.

Hugh Hewitt: We go back to what you said just before the break, that the quality of commentary and analysis is better in mainstream media than it is in new media. Are you familiar with the work of Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post?
Joseph Rago: Yes, I am.
HH: Do you think it’s serious?
JR: No, I don’t.
HH: Are you familiar with the economic analysis of Paul Krugman at the New York Times?
JR: I am.
HH: Do you think it’s serious?
JR: And you know, you can run through…
HH: I’m going to (laughing)
JR: You can tick off Maureen Dowd and you can tick off all sorts of people at the New York Times…
HH: I think we’ll agree that David Brooks does a good job, right?
JR: Sure.
HH: And Nicholas Kristoff does great reporting from Sudan when he’s there, right?
JR: Right.
HH: But do you think E.J. Dionne is a serious analysis of American politics?
JR: I don’t always agree with him, but I would say yes, he’s serious.
HH: Okay, how about anyone at the Los Angeles Times? Name me anyone at all out there who is serious.
JR: Max Boot.
HH: Max is not…he writes a syndicated column. He writes a column that gets picked up there, but I mean a staff columnist.
JR: I can’t think of one.
HH: There aren’t any. In fact, they’re the worst major newspaper in America for a reason that they’ve worked hard to empty themselves of all discernible talent. If you live in California, then, Joe, are you better served by reading and getting your news from the internet and the blogosphere than by taking the L.A. Times?

The media coverage, in hindsight.
More on the politics behind this case;

It’s no secret that hugely disproportionate numbers of the innocent people oppressed by abusive prosecutors and police in this country are African-Americans. Now one of the most outrageous cases of law-enforcement abuse is unfolding in Durham, N.C., home of the Duke lacrosse case. And African-Americans are leading the cheers for the oppressors. Why? The poison of identity politics, plus class hatred of the prosecutor’s three main victims, well-off white men falsely accused of rape by an unstable black “exotic dancer,” and a deeply dishonest district attorney.
Last spring, Durham D.A. Michael Nifong, who is white, was facing a primary in a racially divided electorate. He was badly behind and out of campaign money, excepting almost $30,000 in loans from his personal funds. Then came the accuser’s allegations. Mr. Nifong responded by assuming control of the police investigation and making racially inflammatory statements pronouncing the Duke lacrosse players guilty of rape. Even as evidence of their innocence accumulated, he brought rape, sexual assault and kidnapping charges that fed the racial resentments he had stoked. The black vote put him over the top in both the May 2 primary and the Nov. 7 general election.
Black leaders—including Durham Mayor Bill Bell, the appallingly demagogic North Carolina NAACP and others—should know better. So should the powerful, identity-politics-obsessed hard left of Duke’s own faculty, 88 of whom issued a statement in April saying “thank you” to protesters who had branded the players rapists. And so should the media, most of which gleefully joined the clamor last spring.
It has been clear for many months that the rape claim is almost surely a lie. But not until the DA’s dramatic dismissal last Friday of the rape (but not the sexual assault and kidnapping) charges did Mr. Nifong enablers such as the New York Times and Duke President Richard Brodhead begin distancing themselves from his oppression of three innocent young men.

Damian Brooks;

Imagine for a moment that you’re Brian Hutchinson, a reporter and writer for national media conglomerate CanWest, ostensibly sent to Afghanistan to glean the truth and inform Canadians of it. You try your best, in difficult and unfamiliar circumstances. Some days you get it right, other days you don’t.
Now watch what nameless, faceless, unaccountable editors do to a piece with your name on it, just to satisfy their own prejudices and appeal to what they believe are the leanings of their readers.

Another explanation – headline writing is where the illiterate go to practice journalism.
Another
sloppy headline caught by reader Michael Maltby; Troops raise Ortona Toast for first time since 1942″

…the error is repeated in the body of the story and webpage. Yahoo news manages to get the 1943 date right but not the patriotic Globe. I may be picky about this but after John Doyle’s “creepy” comment, the Globe deserves to be flogged.

Michelle Malkin has an extensive update on the widening search for the most elusive mainstream media source in Iraq. She includes this “map of the wide variety of Baghdad locations from which “Captain Jamil Hussein” had reported incidents of violence to the AP.”

Eason Jordan can’t find him either. (The lead reported by Armed Liberal on Dec.18 turned into a dead end.) Rather than quoting more, I’ll just let you follow the link.
Related: Flopping Aces suspects the Associated Press has been quietly rewriting the story.
Previous SDA posts on the “six burning Sunnis” story.
Dec. 21 UPDATE – “That makes at least five people, organizations, or teams who thus far have been unable to confirm the existence of a Captain Jamil Hussein at Yarmouk. The other four are CPATT, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior (MOI), Marc Danzinger’s team, and Eason Jordan’s team.”
That’s six actually. The Associated Press seems unable to produce him, either.
The Anchoress takes exception to being misrepresented and raises a suspicion a good many of us have already come to, “But as a lifelong avid consumer of news and news-by-products, my own opinion (and I suspect I am not alone) is that the press’ embrasure of “fake but accurate” truthiness and “prove-the-negative” accusation as the acceptable new journalistic standards is equally unprecedented.
Or, maybe not. Maybe the press has always operated exactly as it operates today, and we simply never noticed before.”

Jonah Goldberg

In grade school, whenever a student was caught eating candy, the teacher would ask, “Did you bring enough for everybody?” Time carried this logic through to its absurd conclusion: If everybody can’t be Person of the Year, then no one can. “In the future,” Andy Warhol once predicted, “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Well, start your clocks, people.

The year’s Worst
Related – Lorrie Goldstein notices the media default setting. Now, if only they would.

Chief executive officer Tom Glocer – “Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism”

The comfortable one-way model of publisher to editor to journalist to reader has changed forever. There is no turning back. It kind of happened before our eyes, but like those frogs slowly boiling in water as the heat is turned up, we may not have noticed – unless of course you run classified ads at the local paper.
[…]
So this is a fascinating time to be running a media company. The model has changed in many exciting ways. Not only is the internet providing a low-cost, almost free publishing channel. But it is has transformed how information moves around the world – we no longer have a choke-hold on the flow of information, whether technological, professional or financial.
We don’t decide what people see and when they see it. They have demanded and created the Two-Way Pipe.

He speaks candidly about the Adnan Hajj doctored photo scandal, the problem of staged “fauxtography”, and its broader implications for the industry;

So what does the Hajj incident tell us? There are three key lessons:
The first is accountability. The upside of the flourishing blogosphere is that beyond our own strict editorial standards, there is a new check and balance. I take my hat off to Charles Johnson, the editor of Little Green Footballs. Without his website, the Hajj photo may well have gone unnoticed.
The blogosphere provides accountability. They’re not always going to be right. Indeed, many of the accusations levelled at traditional media are partisan in nature – but some are not. We have to listen to the bloggers – we shouldn’t ignore them.
The second lesson is about the trust of our audience. We learned at Reuters that the action of one man – a man who wasn’t even a full-time staff member – could seriously hurt the trust in our news, built assiduously over 155 years. His stupid decision to clone smoke cost us.
We learned that your reputation is only as good as the last photograph you transmit, or the last story you file.
The final lesson we learned was this – more than ever the world needs a media company free from bias, independent, telling it as it really is, without the filter of national or political interest.

A refreshingly piece, even if you find yourself disagreeing with his broader assessment about the objectivity of Reuters.

When you’re a Winnipeg Free Press columnist;

Now, columnists frequently use their positions to embarrass some employee of a restaurant, clothing store, airport, or other business that fails to give them the respect they’re sure is due to “a public figure”, as Hansen put it.
But this columnist picked a fight with the wrong patsy.
The Liquor Commission promptly fought back with all guns blazing. Starting with videotape of the incident and following with written statements from people who saw and heard what happened.
Oh Oh.

Rusty Shackleford;

…I decided to run a little experiment. I wrote this post this morning. It includes three stories. The first is the car bombing in Baghdad today. The second is a story about Iraqi Police finding a bomb near the Golden Mosque in Samarra. The third is about Iraqi army forces freeing 23 hostages and capturing or killing some members of the cell.
I consider the deaths of the innocent people in the car bombing, “negative news.” I consider the other two stories “positive news.”
I decided to follow all three today and see just who picked them up and who didn’t.

Slamming the AP (and the Iraq Study Group) At HotAir.

Photo courtesy Innovations In Newspapers. There’s lots more.

Mark Tapscott – Washington Examiner;

You probably have heard of the AP story that started it – a horrifying dispatch from Iraq the day after Thanksgiving claiming that six Sunnis had been doused with kerosene as they left their mosque following Friday prayers and burned alive by Shiite-aligned militiamen.
The story, which was quickly picked up by virtually every major news organization in the world, also claimed that “the Shiite-dominated police and Iraqi military” stood by doing nothing as the six people were gruesomely murdered. The story was sourced to “police Captain Jamil Hussein.”
The problem is there appears to be no such person as Captain Jamil Hussein, at least not who is employed by the Iraqi police. The U.S. military says Hussein doesn’t exist and has demanded that AP issue a correction. The Iraqi government says no such person is on its police payroll.
Things have gotten progressively worse for AP since those initial questions about “Hussein” were raised by U.S. and Iraqi officials. A firestorm of criticism has exploded in the Blogosphere as bloggers have researched the names of more than a dozen Iraqi- named sources of apparently doubtful credibility that have appeared in AP stories.
[…]
It’s time for AP to take the same sort of approach to resolve the Captain Jamil Hussein controversy. But there is one big difference between the present issue and the Dan Rather/”60 Minutes” ordeal – AP provides news to virtually every daily newspaper in America. AP is a cornerstone of the mainstream media. If AP’s credibiilty is harmed, every news organization that uses its products also suffers.
Thus, AP should ask the American Society of Newspaper Editors to oversee the appointment and conduct of an independent panel of respected journalists and outside evidentiary experts to determine the truth behind Captain Jamil Hussein and all other sources similarly in doubt.

This is no isolated event – Flopping Aces has discovered Capt. Hussein is the source cited for over 60 AP stories – and he’s not the first to be found questionable;

His partner in crime Lt. Maithem Abdul Razzaq was mentioned as a source in 23 articles until the Iraqi government issued a warrant out for his arrest for impersonating a government official.

You will recall the highly publicized retraction of the articles tainted by Razzaq’s involvement.
No?
Previous.

original page.
Via Tim Blair, who stresses that one “can’t be too careful”.

Rick Fuschi;

Those who caught Robert Rabinovitch proposing a CBC Contract with Canadians, saw a defining moment in diplomacy. That is, the art of saying “nice doggie…nice doggie” until you can get your hands on a rock.

Canadians respond – “Orwellian roach motel”. Heh.

Michael Fulmento recently returned from his third tour as an Iraq embed. In this interview with John Hawkins. the first question concerns how few reporters are doing the same;

Yes, it’s preposterous to think that you can cover a country with 26 million people, the size of California, from a hotel room or from the international zone in a single city. Nobody would try to be a Hollywood reporter from Des Moines, Iowa. What if you turned on the news about some catastrophe, like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans that has been going on a day or so, but the reporter was talking to you from Nome, Alaska? You wouldn’t give it much credence and you shouldn’t give it much credence. The Baghdad Brigade, as I call it, operating out of these hotels — not only would you think that they don’t deserve credence, but time and time again when you look at the stories they write about non-Baghdad areas, you find that they’re wrong.
Hawkins – You don’t have to pull a name out of the hat, but give me an example of that.
This is actually quite important. The Los Angeles Times, right after my next to last embed in April, reported that apparently there was another Fallujah style, Operation Phantom Fury (type attack) about to be carried out any day against Ramadi — and it talked about huge numbers of forces being brought up and this and that — and, of course, we now know it never took place. But, the fact is at the time, there were five reporters listed as chief, secondary, and then contributors. Four were Baghdad-based and one was based in Washington, D.C. So, is it a coincidence that they were completely wrong about this? No, not really. If they had someone in Ramadi, they wouldn’t have written the story. You can’t do these things out of Baghdad and you sure as heck can’t do them out of the District of Columbia (laughs).

Contradicting the prevailing theme, he describes the security situation in Ramadi as greatly improved since he was there six months ago, and is cautiously optimistic about prospects in Iraq.
His comments about the “Baghdad Brigade” are echoed at The Torch, where one of the priorities is auditing the military reporting coming out of Afghanistan;

The real question this focus raises, though, is this: is the attention we’re devoting to Canadian reporting unjustified? Well, not according to at least one member of the press, who expressed the following sentiments to us in private correspondence:

The problem IMHO is that the decisions about such coverage are increasingly being made by editors in Toronto or Ottawa, for reasons wildly unconnected to what’s been going on on the ground there for some time. [Media organization X], for example, insists on using Kandahar as a door prize assignment to hand out to…reporters regardless of their relevant experience (this in one of the most dangerous parts of the world). Many of them have never covered the military, let alone a complex counter-insurgency environment like that of southern Afghanistan, and as a result they mostly stay behind the wire doing “death watch.”
Many of the experienced reporters…who might’ve had the perspective to do stories along the lines that [The Torch] so eloquently outlines, have been sidelined in favour of editors playing [organizational] politics. Personally, I’m so disgusted by the handling of the whole thing I’m not going back to KAF and I’m not the only one who feels this way. The CF’s media strategy and the way they’ve handled the embedding process was and is far from perfect. But the lion’s share of the blame for this distortion of the mission in Afghanistan can’t be laid at their door.

That brings me to something I’ve been noticing lately. The more generalized media auditing that is a primary focus of SDA has prompted a phenomenon of anonymous and defensive comments appearing here from members of the media who attribute misquotes and misrepresentation to their editors, headline writers, even to translaters.
That may all be true. But what is also true is that it doesn’t matter who is responsible. Ignorance, bias, sloppiness, a reluctance to correct false reporting in as aggressive a fashion as it’s first reported – is media malpractice.
Every person who knowingly participates in the release of a flawed product, whether they be the reporter who allows their information to be added to or altered, the editor who ignores a misleading headline, drive-by sneer or burying of the lede – down to the proofreader who realizes that context has being twisted or omitted – all are equally responsible.
Because I make part of my living as an automotive airbrush artist, I spend a good deal of time in automotive body repair shops. It takes a team to restore a damaged vehicle to its original soundness and safety. From the frame straightener to the windshield installer to the paint prep and application, modern automotive body repair is a concert of exacting trades.
Much of it is performed, day in and day out, by people who hold no university degrees. Some aren’t even high school graduates. But, they know their jobs. As craftsmen, they know they will be held responsible for screwing up – but most of all, they understand that everyone who worked on that car shares the consequences when a vehicle is released that fails to meet safety or refinishing standards. Work must be redone. A pattern of faulty workmanship can result in a loss of insurance accreditation.
So, why is it that an industry that produces mere words and facts, that is stacked with university graduates, political celebrities and academics, which serves as a fundamental underpinning of our western democracy, does not hold their members to the standard of performance expected of a nameless welder in an auto repair shop?
How is it that reporters and editors can fail so profoundly, so routinely, with such utter internal unaccountability – and not lose their accreditation to issue a newspaper or news broadcast?
This brings me to the third item in this post, and back to Iraq reporting. The questioning of the source for the Associated Press “six Sunni worshippers burned alive” story (mentioned in previous posts here and here) is now the subject of a column by Boston Herald city editor Jules Crittenden. And he cuts right to the chase;

The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP.
Curt at Floppingaces, www.floppingaces2.blogspot.com, led the charge. He thought there was something strange about an AP report, and took a second look at it, then a third look. He and others blew the lid off it. The AP is making up war crimes. But the resulting stink in the blogosphere has barely wrinkled a nose in the mainstream press. The ethics-obsessed Poynter Institute seems to be oblivious to it.
It has to do with the AP’s Iraqi stringers and an oft-quoted Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein. Problem is, the Iraqi police say Capt. Hussein does not exist. The Iraqi police and U.S. military say an incident described in an AP report – Iraqi soldiers standing by as people were burned alive in a mosque – didn’t happen. Another AP-reported incident, U.S. soldiers shooting 11 civilians, also never happened, the military says.
When the AP was forced to acknowledge this situation, it did so in a story about a new Interior Ministry policy regarding false reports. The AP buried the fact that its own false report prompted this new policy.
The AP stands by its reporting.. The AP has cast “Capt. Jamil Hussein” simply as someone not authorized to speak, and AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll has sniffed morally: “Good reporting relies on more than government-approved sources.”
The AP has another Iraqi stringer problem. Photographer Bilal Hussein is in U.S. custody, and the AP has been clamoring indignantly for his release. AP reports have buried the U.S. explanation that Hussein is being held without charge because – quite aside from producing photos that showed him to be overly intimate with terrorists in Fallujah – he was in an al-Qaeda bomb factory, with an al-Qaeda bombmaker, with traces of explosives on his person when he was arrested.
The AP, of course, has been delivering unbalanced reports about U.S. national politics for some time, as when President Bush, whom AP reporters despise, is barely allowed to state his case on an issue before his critics are given twice as much space to pummel him. The AP, once a just-the-facts news delivery service, has lost its rudder. It has become a partisan, anti-American news agency that seeks to undercut a wartime president and American soldiers in the field. It is providing fraudulent, shoddy goods. It doesn’t even recognize it has a problem.

And apparently, neither do the media sources that you and I rely on for our news. From the CBC National to the news-talk radio stations – much of their information on foreign current events originates with the Associated Press. They simply cannot have missed this story – I see their ip addresses in my logfiles.
The original story was widely reported in Canada – why have we not heard that a controversy exists?
The Iraqi stringer issue is just the latest in a serious of questioned reports. Others are currently questioning whether the AP may be working with Al Jazeera.
That elements of the US media are slowly beginning to acknowledge the problem openly is a beginning. The question is – with a Canadian media so invested in anti-Americanism as both an ideology and marketing device, how long will we wait before the minority who are diligent, who do their research properly, who recognize the bias, the misreporting, the under-reporting, are willing to move the extra step and take their complaints beyond anonymous comments and private emails to bloggers?
(Related – The future of journalism doesn’t look any brighter.)
By request – Democracy Project has a listing of the AP Board of Directors.
UPDATE – Bill Roggio is back embedded in Iraq. (The same Bill Roggio who reported on the Canadian media “death watch” while embedded with our Canadian Forces a few months ago) His post covers the soldiers’ take on “balcony reporting”. They feel the press has “abandoned them” and small wonder, when the only good soldier these days is a flag draped “victim”;

What a terrible situation to be in, having to defend yourself because of your profession. I’ve always said that the hardest thing about embedding (besides leaving my family) is wearing the badge that says ‘PRESS.’ That hasn’t changed. I hide the badge whenever I can get away with it.
This isn’t the first time I encountered this sentiment from the troops. I experienced this attitude from the Marines while I was in western Iraq last year, and the soldiers in the Canadian Army in Afghanistan also expressed frustration with the media’s presentation of the war.

Another independent, so hit his paypal button if you can.
Dec.4 Update – New York Times Baghdad correspondent Ed Wong questioned the legitimacy of the AP report when it originally broke;

Hi Tom,
You ask me about what our own reporting shows about this incident. When we first heard of the event on Nov. 24, through the A.P. story and a man named Imad al-Hashemi talking about it on television, we had our Iraqi reporters make calls to people in the Hurriya neighborhood. Because of the curfew that day, everything had to be done by phone. We reached several people who told us about the mosque attacks, but said they had heard nothing of Sunni worshippers being burned alive. Any big news event travels quickly by word of mouth through Baghdad, aided by the enormous proliferation of cell phones here. Such an incident would have been so abominable that a great many of the residents in Hurriya, as well as in other Sunni Arab districts, would have been in an uproar over it. Hard-line Sunni Arab organizations such as the Muslim Scholars Association or the Iraqi Islamic Party would almost certainly have appeared on television that day or the next to denounce this specific incident. Iraqi clerics and politicians are not shy about doing this. Yet, as far as I know, there was no widespread talk of the incident. So I mentioned it only in passing in my report.
Best,
Ed Wong

Dec. 20 Updates: Michelle Malkin is still digging.

Those “in the know” are stressing the importance of an item buried in the second portion of a news conference from the Iraq Interior ;
Rusty Shackleford;

This is the sniper known as Juba, who is a real hero to the jihadis around the world. He has real superhero status and there are plenty of popular myths surrounding him. He’s not what you’d call a ‘Big Fish’ in the organizational sense, but as a moral victory his capture is ENORMOUS.

The main thrust of the news conference centered on the continuing pattern of MSM reporting of unsubstantiated rumour as fact. Michelle Malkin has a lengthy, link rich post, from which I’m sharing a few exerpts.
The first involves the Associated Press named source for the of “6 Sunnis burned alive” story that swept the international news cycle last week;

BG Abdul-Kareem, the Ministry of Interior Spokesman, went on the record today stating that Capt. Jamil Hussein is not a police officer. He explained the coordinations among MOI, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Defense in attempting to track down these bodies and their joint conclusion was that this was unsubstantiated rumor.
He went on to name several other false sources that have been used recently and appealed to the media to document their news before reporting. He went into some detail about the impact of the press carrying propaganda for the enemies of Iraq and thanked “the friends” who have brought this to their attention.

A lot of work has been going on behind the scenes on this story among bloggers, despite the protests of Associated Press. But it’s not the only instance causing concern for the Iraqi government.

The ministry received in a week more than 12 cases of claims, one stating 50 killed were there, 200 kidnapped here, 30 corpses found there etc. And when we dispatched our forces and investigators to the locations, we found nothing.

Finally, an officer in the US Army Reserves currently serving in Iraq writes in The American Thinker;

Sunni “eyewitnesses” confidently denounced the Shiite-dominated government for their inaction. There were bold claims that the Iraqi Army stood by and did nothing as this horrifying crime happened. People around the world braced themselves for the spectacular reprisals that would surely come from the Sunni. The press practically salivated at the bloodshed (and glorious headlines) that would be forthcoming.
A winning situation all around.
Except, well, except for the tiny little detail that the incident most likely never happened. A week has gone by and no charred bodies were produced. No dramatic funeral parades, with all the attendant wailing and gnashing of teeth, occurred. Not one photo. No grand reprisals. Not even any speeches (and it is hard to imagine Iraqi religious leaders miss an opportunity to make speeches). Just a few remarks from the Iraqi government, largely ignored by the U.S. press, that all reports showed that that particular district had been quiet, and pleading the Iraqi people for calm.
No one thought to question this unusual divergence from normal protocol.

And don’t forget the blogger who started it all – a sure bet for the latest developments – Flopping Aces.
The excuses given – that it’s hard for reporters to move freely in Iraq, that the circumstances demand they rely on Iraqi stringers just doesn’t cut it. If they can’t confirm, then they shouldn’t report. If the account is disputed by official sources, they need to place that disclaimer front and center.
Perhaps Capt Hussein exists. Perhaps his employment records are stuck in a drawer or spelled incorrectly in the database. But at this point, the only people who are steadfastly defending his credentials are those with most to lose – Associated Press. Whatever the facts turn out to be in this case, there is no doubt that the media we rely on has allowed themselves to become deeply compromised. Until they’ve addressed the issue of relying on stringers and rumour reportage, it is probably wisest to approach any and all reporting coming out of Iraq with the “suspension of belief”.
Update: This story has gone mainstream, prompted by the almost palpable anger generated in the media by an announcement that the Iraqis are setting up a media monitoring unit that will demand accuracy in reporting.
For an example of “gratuitous slam reporting” – in the last paragraph of this response from the Associated Press we are reminded of media oppression under Saddam Hussein.
It’s why they’ve been leading the charge to have him return, I guess.
The idea of a media monitoring unit is not an ideal solution by any stretch of the imagination – but hey – from the Jenin massacre to green helmet man to the unluckiest homeowner in Lebanon to the unburned mosques and mysterious Capt Hussein – they’ve made their bed.
Dec. 4 updates – it’s revealed that NYT Baghdad correspondent Ed Wong questioned the legitimacy of the AP report when it originally broke.

What you haven’t heard, and he won’t tell you!;

Quickly now – no Googling: can you name three projects Canada’s Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (KPRT) has undertaken in the past year? The first wiseguy to spout off that “they dug a well” gets a slap in the head for his trouble.
If you couldn’t think of one specific thing, you’re not alone – I couldn’t either, until I did a bit of digging. The truth is that the KPRT has almost a hundred projects either on the go or completed right now, put together by CF, Civilian Police (CivPol), DFAIT, or CIDA personnel with the team.
[…]
Here’s a stat that might surprise you as well: since January 16th of this year, 175 journalists from 37 different media outlets have embedded with the CF in Afghanistan. How many stories have you seen about the KPRT – other than from the BBC? Now, how many ramp ceremonies have you seen?

A true “good news from Afghanistan” roundup in the Arthur Chrenkoff tradition. Check it out.