Fake News Alert: "Hersh Says Cheney, Sharon Plotted Hariri and Bhutto Assassinations"

[yolland]

Fake News Alert: "Hersh Says Cheney, Sharon Plotted Hariri and Bhutto Assassinations"

So yesterday several Pakistani and Indian news sites (Dawn, Nation, WebIndia123, Thaindian) foolishly reported without checking--then some morons at Wall Street Journal and American Spectator passed on--a bizarre claim, of as-yet-unclear origin, that American journalist Seymour Hersh had revealed to "an Arab TV channel" that a death squad answering to Dick Cheney, headed by US Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and featuring Ariel Sharon as a key player was behind the assassinations of both Benazir Bhutto and Rafik Hariri.

Fortunately, Hersh heard about the story within several hours, and immediately came out with a public statement that it was "complete madness." Most of the offending news sites have since taken down their links (though Raw Story managed to capture some screenshots of the evidence at WSJ and AmSpec).

Hersh had done an interview last week with GulfTV, in which he was asked again about allegations he'd made on CNN back in March that the Joint Special Ops Command had been reporting directly to Cheney concerning targeted assassinations of 'high-value' terrorists (CNN then spoke with Cheney's former national security adviser John Hannah, who acknowledged such actions occur but denied the direct executive oversight). Bhutto and Sharon were never mentioned by either Hersh or the GulfTV reporter, and Hersh never suggested that JSOC was involved in political assassinations nor spoke of a Cheney "death squad." The GulfTV reporter did ask if JSOC could've been responsible for Hariri's assassination, to which Hersh replied, "No--Hariri, America--no. Impossible, there was no reason."



There have been numerous discomfiting instances in the past couple years of otherwise-respectable news outlets publishing unverified info from blogs or emails which turned out to be B.S. This is one of the worst I've seen, though. How could it not have occurred to any of these editors to ask "Which Arab channel, and when?" How could it not have occurred to them that a man in a coma might experience certain problems playing a key role in a death squad? I can understand the South Asian sites, particularly the two Indian ones which aren't hugely reputable to begin with, perhaps not being familiar with Sy Hersh, but come on, what kind of boneheads do they have working at WSJ and American Spectator now that they didn't detect at least a little whiff of bullshit here?

 

[AliEnvy]

It's likely that online content does not go through the same editorial rigor as print in part because it's easily retractable. The pressure to break a story - when information moves so incredibly fast these days - trumps the facts if it can just disappear.

 

[anitram]

Didn't Maureen Dowd just get caught for plagiarizing a blog?

I think we'll be seeing more and more of this as time goes on.

 

[VintagePunk]

That reminds me of this story I heard about the other day:


The Associated Press: Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote

Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK – May 11, 2009

DUBLIN (AP) — When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major's made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.

They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.

"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.

"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."

Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.

When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.

He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences.

If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source — and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.

Wikipedia spokesman Jay Walsh said he appreciated the Dublin student's point, and said he agreed it was "distressing so see how quickly journalists would descend on that information without double-checking it."

"We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too. He's identified a flaw," Walsh said in a telephone interview from Wikipedia's San Francisco base.

But Walsh said there were more responsible ways to measure journalists' use of Wikipedia than through well-timed sabotage of one of the site's 12 million listings. "Our network of volunteer editors do thankless work trying to provide the highest-quality information. They will be rightly perturbed and irritated about this," he said.

Fitzgerald stressed that Wikipedia's system requiring about 1,500 volunteer "administrators" and the wider public to spot bogus additions did its job, removing the quote three times within minutes or hours. It was journalists eager for a quick, pithy quote that was the problem.

He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal.

"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.

Walsh said this was the first time to his knowledge that an academic researcher had placed false information on a Wikipedia listing specifically to test how the media would handle it.

 

[AliEnvy]

An interesting op-ed on a New York Times faux pas (which itself has a misleading title...)...the death throes of a dying newspaper business or good old fashioned media propaganda?

David Bromwich: New York Times Falsifies Obama-Netanyahu Meeting