Watching the watchdogs

Mainstream media don’t like being watched and reported on, though they have a whole army of bloggers after them these days. But here’s a different media watcher, the Iraq Interior Ministry. Though the AP appears indifferent, my bet is that folks there aren’t too comfortable with all this (already being in a dispute with U.S. Central Command & all).

An interesting development in response to the CENTCOM vs. AP dispute:
 
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Iraq’s Interior Ministry said Thursday it had formed a special unit to monitor news coverage and vowed to take legal action against journalists who failed to correct stories the ministry deemed to be incorrect.

Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesman for the ministry, said the purpose of the special monitoring unit was to find “fabricated and false news that hurts and gives the Iraqis a wrong picture that the security situation is very bad, when the facts are totally different.”

He said offenders would be notified and asked to “correct these false reports on their main news programs. But if they do not change those lying, false stories, then we will seek legal action against them.”

Khalaf explained the news monitoring unit at a weekly Ministry of Interior briefing. As an example, he cited coverage by The Associated Press of an attack Nov. 24 on a mosque in the Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad.

The AP threw in this paragraph at the end:

Under Saddam Hussein’s regime, the government imposed censorship on local media and severely restricted foreign media coverage, monitoring transmissions and sending secret police to follow journalists. Those who violated the rules were expelled and in some cases jailed.

The reporter appears to be implying that this utterly banal PR initiative is a return to the bad old days of Saddam. Doesn’t anyone at the AP read this stuff and think, “Wow. If we run something this hyperbolic, we’re going to look really, really foolish.” Apparently not.

Some big media aren’t too good at examining themselves for accuracy and authentication.

What was that dispute between Central Command and the AP? That comes up in this article, too.

The AP reported that six Sunni Muslims there were burned alive during the attack. The story quoted witnesses and police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Khalaf said the ministry had no one on its staff by the name of Jamil Hussein.

Khalaf said the ministry had dispatched a team to the Hurriyah neighborhood and to the morgue but found no witnesses or evidence of burned bodies…

U.S. military had no comment on the immolations on the day of the attack but subsequently issued a statement, citing the Iraqi army as saying it had found nothing to substantiate the report.

U.S. Navy Lt. Michael B. Dean, a public affairs officer for the multi-national force, later demanded that the story be retracted because he said police Capt. Jamil Hussein “is not a Baghdad police officer or an MOI employee.”

And the story unraveled from there. Michelle Malkin, among others, has a lot on this. It demands the attention. False reporting in our media not only does harm to our own military and jeopardizes their safety, but it also turns our media into instruments of propaganda for the enemy. Not everything we see on our tv screens or read in our papers is true.