Yet Another Case of Repeating a Lie Often Enough...

[Bruzilla]

Drudge is reporting that Jessica Lynch criticized "the military" for exaggerating accounts of her rescue and recasting her ordeal as patriotic fable. Asked by ABCNEWS anchor Diane Sawyer if military's portrayal of rescue bothered her, Lynch said: 'Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong'... Asked how she felt about reports of her heroism: 'It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, Yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't'... Asked about claims the military exaggerated danger of the rescue mission: 'Yeah, I don't think it happened quite like that'...

Once again, the military never reported anything besides "we are investigating what happened at the ambush site." It was the media people, madly scrambling to be the first to get a hot story out, who were generating all the reports of what "didn't" happen. How many times did we hear about "un-named sources", "sources with inside information", or "eyewitness accounts" coming from who knew where? The media folks were using low-level people who had no frigging clue what happened, and who were guessing or making judgements based on innaccurate information, and cooked up their stories rather than wait for the military to finish its investigation. Yet the way Sawyer phrases the question, we once again see a media type trying to cast blame on the military.

Also, she's more than half out-of-it when she gets whisked out of the hospital and has no flipping clue what was going on. How fair si it to ask her anything about whether the rescue was exagerated?

 

[MGKrebs]

And yet,

You would choose to blame the media, who weren't there and HAD to get their stories from military sources, for reporting what military sources were telling them.

I probably dislike most of the media as much as you do, but that doesn't mean the military gets a free pass when they try to bullshit us.

How many times has the Pentagon, and even Powell and Bush, declared that WMD's have been found, only to find a retraction 2 days later on page C17.

 

[Bruzilla]

Hey MGK! Long time no see.

You're mixing apples and oranges... again. Neither Powell, Bush, not any other Pentagon spokesman ever said anything about Lynch's capture other than "we're investigating it." So, how exactly was the military attempting to BS us?

I blame the media for using unreliable sources of information in order to make a story. We saw the same thing with the sniper case when every media outlet had every former FBI agent of agent wannabe on the TV or in articles giving their opinions on who the sniper was. When it turned out that they were all 100% wrong, the same outlets started blasting the real FBI, except the real FBI never issued any solid information. Between Lynch and the sniper it seems the media has a real problem remembering who's sourcing their data.

 

[Frank]

Re: And yet,

Originally posted by MGKrebs

How many times has the Pentagon, and even Powell and Bush, declared that WMD's have been found, only to find a retraction 2 days later on page C17.

???

I can't recall having ever seen this. Can you give an example?

 

[MGKrebs]

Q But, still, those countries who didn't support the Iraqi Freedom operation use the same argument, weapons of mass destruction haven't been found. So what argument will you use now to justify this war?

THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/g8/interview5.html

 

[MGKrebs]

Howdy Bru.

I don't wanna give the media too much credit, because I think they are often very sloppy/lazy too.

However, having said that, I also believe that sometimes (certainly not always), those first reports are more truthful than the sanitized versions we get when we wait for the officials to decide what to tell us.

Reporters are supposed to dig around and try to get at the truth, not wait for a press release for every damn thing.

As far as trying to "make" a story, I agree. And as someone who is one step away from being a socialist, I would say: That is capitalism for ya'. If we keep buying the crap they feed us, they will keep writing it. They gotta sell their advertising.

So on the one hand, we applaud the free market system that makes the media compete with each other, but then we criticize them when they create the stuff that sells the best.