Remember when Jessica Lynch testified before Congress five years ago and implied that the Pentagon, desperate for an Iraq war hero in 2003, fed the news media a story that she shot it out with Saddam's troops before they captured her?
“They chose to lie and tried to make me a legend,” Lynch testified.
Her view of the poorly reported and poorly edited story that The Washington Post published April 3, 2003, was the result of The Washington Post's failure to correct the story promptly, its failure to identify the "one official" it quoted, and the failure of the press as a whole to expose The Washington Post's total responsibility for the lie of a "legend" it created.
The Post cover-up. The lie wasn't that Lynch was a hero. Of course, she was, simply for being there, risking her life to defeat Iraq's totalitarian Baathists. The lie was in reporting the fictitious March 23, 2003, gunfight so prominently, refusing to correct the error clearly, and letting President Bush and the Pentagon take the blame, with sinister motives attached, for issuing the false story.
Well, now we're hearing The Washington Post has sunk even deeper to cover up its chronic dishonesty. A few weeks ago, according to W. Joseph Campbell who has been following the scandal, it erased the story and the story's headline from its website. The Post gave no explanation.
The Post's ombudsman Patrick Pexton said he was checking out why the story disappeared. Yeah, I'll bet he's checking hard.
Frank
I can shave a lot of time off of their search. I'm sure that in the end they will find that Bush did it.
Posted by: CJW | July 09, 2012 at 09:25 PM
Oh that's nothing. If you keep up with Slate at all (an online arm of the Washington Post) here's what was going on last month.
Their Innovations Editor publish a lengthy story on two gay men, one in Military, who "married" under military auspices. Both men declared themselves dedicated Christians apparently. Both had been married before, 2 children each. One had been the choir director at his church, which apparently is where they met. It was a real celebration of their love...
Long story short, Slate's social media editor, Jeremy S., was actively deleting the posts that dissented from supporting gay marriage and every related issue to the article, like the fact that if this was a heterosexual couple who fell "in love" at church and betrayed their marriage vows thoooose Christians would be paraded in the media very differently. After deleting the poster's comment, he would delete the poster's Profile as well!!! Forcing them to create a new Profile EVERTYTIME they wanted to post. I know, I did this at least 4 times just to verify if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. But it gets better.
Jeremy apparently realized that even though he deleted the comments and Profiles, if the poster had "Liked" another's comment, their Profile Name remained visible attached to that "Like". He then began deleting THOSE comments in order to eliminate the evidence that the Profile had existed (apparently, why else would he stoop to the nth degree of deception to cover his tracks?) Finally, he simply DE-activated the "Like" function entirely, and the Response function as well.
So, while Slate was showing the vast majority of posters "favoring" this lovely union, and posting warm fuzzies, Yahoo had an article covering the Gay Parade in San Diego, including members of military in uniform. And 95%+ of THOSE comments were NOT supportive of this gay show. Interesting hey? Obviously Slate readers are not universally opposite of Yahoo readers...it was shortly after this that Mr. Dan Cathy of Chic Fila fame was shoved into the limelight. What a coincidence, hey????
Posted by: PJ Smith | August 22, 2012 at 10:18 AM