Published: Sat, 9 Dec 2006 20:17:45 +0900

The Associated Press of course:

THE most powerful media institution in all of human history is the Associated Press. Its news feed is ubiquitous - used, directly or indirectly, by every U.S. newspaper and TV news program and a vast number of foreign ones, too. AP maintains the largest world-wide coverage, and its reader base is nearly immeasurable. Unfortunately, and repeatedly of late, this behemoth has not only been getting it wrong - but increasingly refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

Instead, acting more like a politician or the mega-corporation that it is, the AP crew spins, obfuscates and attacks. Now they're at it again in Iraq.

I have got direct experience of this - from challenging the AP's seriously flawed 1999 "scoop" about the massacre near the South Korean village of No Gun Ri during the opening days of the Korean War.

Bad things did happen at No Gun Ri, of this there can be no doubt. My own research and other historians', as well as the joint U.S.-Korean government investigation, confirms that a tragedy occurred - there were civilians who were killed there, by our side, and that was wrong.

But the AP's sensationalistic story painted it as a deliberate massacre, done with machine guns at extremely close range.

The most sensational account started in the 57th paragraph of the 3,448-word story, sourced to one Edward Daily. As AP told it, Daily was the only soldier at No Gun Ri who directly received orders from his officers to turn his water-cooled .30 caliber machinegun on the civilians and shoot them down in cold blood at point-blank range.

Daily's account was chilling. It was also - as AP should have known - a fantasy.

The AP story took at face value Daily's claims that he was a combat infantryman who won a battlefield commission just a few days after the events at No Gun Ri, and had been awarded the Distinguished Cross and three Purple-Hearts.

In reality, he was an enlisted mechanic in an entirely different unit, nowhere near No Gun Ri. He had fabricated his biography and credentials as well as his entire account of the events at No Gun Ri.

When I later confronted AP editors with the facts and records that showed their source Daily to be a fraud, they blew me off. What would a historian know about this topic after all, or a soldier?

The AP didn't issue a retraction, or even attempt to reinvestigate; and it certainly didn't withdraw the story from the Pulitzer competition. Instead, it attacked the messenger.

Make sure you read the rest of the article.

Robert Bateman wrote the book, No Gun-ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident, that exposed much of the sloppy reporting by the AP in their No Gun Ri story and lays out a very strong case of what happened at No Gun-ri based on physical evidence.* Due to his efforts, Bateman had to withstand an AP attack on him for exposing their sloppy reporting.

I'm sure Bateman is looking on with some personal satisfaction as AP has been caught yet again sensationalizing the news.* If you haven't read "Who is Jamil Hussein?" yet, than you have been missing out because you really should.* The AP No Gun-ri reporting aided the North Korean enemy in a limited manner by helping to mobilize public opinion in South Korea against the US military, but the Jamil Hussein controversy is the AP directly taking news reports straight from the enemy and reporting it as fact for two years!* This would be funny if it wasn't so serious.*

HT: MM

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I take most everything the media says with a grain of salt. I've seen firsthand how retarded they are at times.

Less than 4 months ago, when I was still in Iraq, one of the bi-weekly mortar attacks against our base finally got lucky. They landed a round into the ammo storage area. With the mortars, artillery shells, grenades, and demo charges stored there; the resulting explosions continued for about 6 hours. Unexploded ordinance were scattered all over the base. The next morning we only had few minor injuries and no casualties. We were damn lucky.

When the media got ahold of the story, the reports ranged from 300 dead to a nuclear detonation on my FOB. They even produced a list of names and units of the casualties. I posted a reply to let them know just how stupid they were. They had several names of casualties from my unit. Not a single person listed was even IN my unit. They also had a few units listed that weren't even stationed at my FOB. As far as the nuclear explosion, I reminded them that as close as my base was to downtown Baghdad, a nuclear blast would have incinerated both the FOB and a good chunk of the capital. I certainly wouldn't be here now.

So, the moral is don't believe what you read without investigating it yourself. Especially when dealing with wartime reports.

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