Jeffrey Schuster revisits the looting of the Iraq National Museum in the days following the fall of Saddam Hussein, and how foreign journalists grabbed misinformation fed them by “museum officials” – Baath party appointees – without skepticism or verification, and ran with it.

By the end of the day on Saturday, April 12, then, the major outlines of the story had been set by the journalists in Baghdad. According to the officials who had been located and interviewed on the museum grounds, most if not all of the collection had been removed by looting Iraqis. Again, according to a handful of Iraqis on the grounds, the American forces, who could have prevented this catastrophe, did nothing. Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul McGeough, who linked the museum story to his wider anti-war stance, did not hesitate to cast the first stone. “After witnessing three weeks of attacks on Baghdad and almost a week of looting – especially of the Iraq National Museum,” he writes, “questions about where the criminality lies become blurred.”

The numbers of artifacts lost inflated as one report followed another, and academics joined the chorus. The “170,000” items of antiquity lost from the undefended museum were worth “billions of dollars”. It was an “act of violence against humanity”, “a tragedy that has no parallel in world history”. No latitude was given to a US military occupied with battling the murderous Saddam Fedayeen – the “no war for oil” chorus rewrote the pages of their songbooks. The charge that “lives are more important than oil” was replaced with “pottery is more important than lives”.

Some reporters, like McGeough, used the situation to take a cheap-shot at the US administration. Others, like Burns, were simply “disposed to believe the worst.” And still others were unable or unwilling to fact-check some of the basic points of the story, the most crucial being the figure of 170,000 coming from Nabhal Amin, a former official who was not privy to all of the procedures that had been implemented over the preceding months to safeguard Iraq’s antiquities. The academics, however, probably come off with the largest stain on their reputations. That members of a professional class who swear by the tenets of critical thinking and the presentation of evidence at every turn would be the first ones to accuse the US military without waiting for a proper investigation tells us a lot about the state of current political discourse in academia. There were few apologies and when they did come they were uttered through clenched teeth.

Via the German blog, Medienkritik.

Mick Stockinger notices something odd in a CNN report on a US Senate vote over oil drilling in Alaska.

The picture’s caption reads: “Musk ox graze in an area proposed as a possible site for oil exploration inside Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

Hmmm. Considering that the proposed drill site is on the coastal plain and that the Brooks range is nearly over the horizon, at the southern edge of ANWR wilderness area, I would say that this is a flat-out lie.
[…]
There are actually two kinds of deception going on here. The site may well have been included in a 1987 proposal to congress, but it bears no relevance to the current ANWR drilling proposal. Captioning the photo makes me very suspicious that this is no inadvertant mistake or simple sloppiness. Aside from the equivocation on which proposal is being discussed, I believe CNN inserted this photograph because it has a much more appealing esthetic than the coastal plain where the facility is actually proposed to be built. Tundra just doesn’t tug at the heart strings the way snow- capped mountains do.

Via Michelle Malkin.

The final version of my letter of complaint to the Vancouver Sun has been published (popup jpg) re: a Spector column titled “Appalling glee on the right at the prospect of US payback for a dithering PM”.
As I pointed out to his editors, the column was completely devoid of URL’s or direct quotes to support his accusation. That should have been their first sniff that something was rancid… but editors are lazy, I guess – trivial matters like going to the source for fact checking purposes is too much effort. So much for the professionalism of the “mainstream media”.
For background, read the original post and comments and compare it to Spector’s take. Note that the chain of events places the appearance of his column in the Vancouver Sun in very close proximity, time-line wise, with his suspension of authorship privilages from the same website he critiques. Norm asserts that his column was submitted prior to his suspension – I’ll take him at his word. (The details about his departure were not public until he chose to volunteer them in an announcement of his “resignation” at Blogs Canada*.)
I was invited by Patricia Graham, Editor in Chief, to submit a letter. The original version appears here in its original email form.

Thanks; I’ve passed it along to the letters editor so you may hear from us prior to publication.

On morning of March 8th, I recieved a cheery note from Cheryl Parker, Letters editor, along with a request for my phone and address for their files. I asked she include the url for my blogsite.

Thank you, Kate. I’ll add the url and let you know what day it will be in the paper.

Late in the afternoon I recieved a call from Fazil Milhar (editorial pages editor). He asked pointedly if the content of Shotgun post had been changed since it was written on March 2nd. I assured him that it hadn’t. He seemed reluctant to believe me, and the interrogation continued. It began to occur to me that the question was in fact, a veiled accusation.
I wonder where he got that idea?
I informed Mr.Milhar of the protocols concerning blog changes and updates, and that to the best of my knowledge, nothing had been altered or removed from the post or its comments by me or anyone else. (Oddly, he did not contact the editors of the WS for verification.)
He then declared that, under Canadian law, the Vancouver Sun was legally responsible for any libel that might be on an external link, and that because content might change after the fact, they would not provide a direct URL to the “Missile Defence” post at the Shotgun. I countered that on any given day you could find external links in the pages of newspapers – it didn’t seem to be a concern to the Montreal Gazette when they published a link to Monte Solberg’s blog.
There was complete silence for a moment.
In lieu of a URL to the thread, he offered to quote the post directly. That only addresed the remarks about the alleged comparison of Arafat to Paul Martin – not the “glee” he alleged in the comments. I suspect the Sun might have wanted to steer readers well clear of the thread, in view of their columnists contributions to it;

If you spent less time as an anonymouse writing long-winded, over- intellectualized and meaningless postings, you too could probably learn French. Lots of westerners have, including the deputy minister of finance. And it’s not as if French immersion hasn’t been around for a few years. Face it: you’re a bigot.”

During the discussion, I filled him in on the fact that Norm had been suspended and asked if he was aware of his conduct in previous weeks on the internet. He resignedly admitted he had, and from my end of the line, didn’t sound particularly happy about what he’d found.
As is their nature, editors have difficulty recognizing that readers are not employees. Later that evening, I recieved a sharply redacted rewrite of my letter, ending with this;

“I leave it to readers to decide whose interpretation is correct, Spector’s or
mine.”

I replied that my interpretation was not subject to majority vote, and unrewrote the rewrite. I received this reply:

“For legal reasons, we will not refer to Western Standard’s Shotgun blog.”

Legal reasons? This is the same Vancouver Sun that gave approval to Norm Spector to write;

” the website of the Western Standard — a diverse group united only in their antipathy to lefties and Liberals..”

From the Law Offices of Flip, Flop and Bipolar….
I finally agreed to the version that was published. It had become obvious to me that protecting Norm Spector from the embarrassment of his own misrepresentation trumps journalistic ethics and transparency at the Vancouver Sun. More to the point, the exercise had already served its original purpose.
Despite the title they preface the letter with – Treat Blog Writers With Respect Due Other Authors, there is no mention of SDA or the Western Standard Shotgun.
A raw text file containing the full exchange from which the exerpts have been taken is here.