The new york times has once again embarrassed itself with yet another fake news item it has published. The man who claimed to be in this infamous photograph from abu ghraib prison turned out to be a liar.
It was a dramatic front-page story to match an infamous photo: the chilling shot of an Abu Ghraib prisoner, hooded, standing on a box, electrical wires attached to his outstretched arms.
But after questions were raised by the online magazine Salon, the Times acknowledged last night that the story was flat wrong. The prisoner in the photograph was not Qaissi, who has belatedly admitted that to the newspaper.
"The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi's insistence that he was the man in the photograph" and "should have been more persistent in seeking comment from the military," the paper said in an editor's note.
I found this analysis most interesting. 'Jeffn' left a comment over at the Captain's Quarters illuminating the festering puss of obvious bias that has plagued the grey lady for many decades:
So let's put this in perspective. The major news outlets will gleefully write a page 1 story about some guy claiming to be "the hooded man" based on claims from human rights organization (which is a euphemism for anti-US groups) but the release of documents about links between OBL and Iraq "don't have enough evidentiary value"? It's clearly a double system where anything this is biased against the U.S. government or intended to embarrass or indict the military has one standard of evidence and due diligence, while the stories that do not accomplish the above are subject to more thorough due diligence in the hope that they are not true. Amazing.
This obvious example of poor journalism is one in a long line of festering puss for this publication. One needs only go back to 2003 and the Jayson Blair debacle that ended with the resignation of the managing editor and the executive editor.
Another example is the obvious manipulation of opinion polls to suit the ny times' bias.
And the festering puss is even decades old as evidenced by the shameful -- and knowingly -- false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine by the new york times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago. The Pulitzer committee is currently attempting to strip the ny times, and the now deceased Duranty, of a wrongly bestowed Pulitzer prize for his published lies.
It is one thing for a no talent hack like me to blow hot air and publish ill informed banter because who the heck takes me seriously?
But many of this nations news outlets set their journalistic clocks and agendas by what the ny times has on its pages. How many times can a beached vessel torpedo itself and still have people wanting to buy passage aboard?