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The most explosive and far-reaching news story of the year has nothing to do with underage pages and a certain Republican ex-Congressman. This story involves ignition in the streets of Baghdad and six immolations that probably never occurred. While Mark Foley took down a congressional majority, the tale of Jamil Hussein may end up permanently damaging the credibility of the world's premier news gathering source, the Associate Press... The story begins on Nov. 24 when Qais al-Bashir, an Iraqi "stringer" working for the AP, wrote a story in which he alleged that Shiite militiamen avenging earlier attacks burned down four...

Another search through different avenues has failed to turn up AP’s source for more than 60 reports of atrocities and murders: The AP (non-)responds and another search comes up empty.

On the Thursday, October 5, 2006, edition of the Today Show, Matt Lauer announced that Ms. McGee was "unemployed" because "she says she showed some students some art and it got her fired." Ms. McGee also stated on camera "[i]t really blindsided me to go in the next day and realize my job was over." Finally, Ms. McGee claimed the principal reprimanded her for exposing students to nude art. All of these statements are false, despite the real facts being available to the media and Ms. McGee for weeks. The real facts are: 1) The Today Show showed its audience...

Time magazine's much-publicized July 17th cover story, "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy," has been viewed as a seminal media effort to capture the transformation of the Bush Administration from a trigger-happy approach in foreign policy to reliance on other nations and the U.N. But a careful analysis shows that Time exaggerated and distorted the facts in order to produce a story that would entice and mislead its readers. It would be foolish to insist that changes in the Bush foreign policy have not been made. Since Condoleezza Rice became Secretary of State, she has clearly been relying more on the...

(Machine Translated) *Critical excerpts of the text: Till this day Islamic terrorists have not succeeded yet in striking in Germany. But mean the mess according to unanimous expert's opinion nothing. Above all not, because it already three attempts given hat: In 2002 one wanted to commit an Abu Mussab al-Sarkawi attached terror cell posters against Jewish and putatively Jewish equipment in Berlin and in the Ruhr area. In 2003 Tunisian Ihsan Garnaoui should have planned to explain a poster in the midst of a demonstration in Berlin. In the end of 2004 lifted security services a group of Kurdish Iraqis...

SANTA ROSA A Roman Catholic church official apologized Saturday for waiting several days to notify authorities about sexual abuse allegations against a priest, a delay that may have allowed the priest to flee to Mexico. Bishop Daniel Walsh of the Santa Rosa diocese said in a one-page statement to parishioners he put "caution" before "doing the right thing" in handling the allegations against priest Xavier Ochoa. Church officials say Ochoa admitted April 28 to sexually abusing a 12-year-old altar boy, but the allegations were not reported to Child Protective Services until May 1, and Ochoa disappeared the next day. "I...

If Mary Mapes is looking for a way to fill her days, HDNet's upcoming "Dan Rather Reports" seems to have plenty of job openings left to fill. According to Dan Rather's new employer, the debut of "Dan Rather Reports" is scheduled for just two months from now, in October. Yet according to HDNet's Web site, the program is currently (as of August 3) seeking multiple producers, associate producers and editors -- basically, all of the off-camera reporters and production staffers who make a big TV news show work. For the job listings page: www.hd.net. [This item by Rich Noyes was...

J.P. Borda started a Web log during his 2004 National Guard deployment in Afghanistan to keep in touch with his family. But when he got home, he decided it was the mainstream media that was out of touch with the war. "You hear so much about what's going wrong," he says. "It gets hard to hear after a while when there's so much good going on." Mr. Borda, a specialist, read other soldiers' blogs and found he wasn't alone. Hundreds of other troops and veterans were blogging world-wide, and many focused on a common enemy: journalists. Military blogger J.P. Borda,...

WASHINGTON - The House on Thursday approved a Republican-crafted resolution condemning news organizations for revealing a covert government program to track terrorist financing, saying the disclosure had "placed the lives of Americans in danger." The resolution, passed 227-183 on a largely party-line vote, did not specifically name the news organizations, but it was aimed at the New York Times and other news media that last week reported on a secret CIA-Treasury program to track millions of financial records in search of terrorists. Most Democrats opposed the measure, protesting language in it that asserts that the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program was...

Award Worthy?Last year the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard gave an award for investigative reporting to David Willman of The Los Angeles Times. Willman, in turn, has picked up a few other notable trophies. “He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, first, as a member of a team thrown into the breach to cover a disastrous earthquake, and, second, in 2001, for his own investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s very flawed drug approval process,” Alex Jones of the Kennedy School pointed out. I can’t speak about the earthquake but I did some reporting on the...

Interview with Peggy Wehmeyer In 1989, Peter Jennings pulled Peggy Wehmeyer out of local television in Dallas to join ABC World News Tonight, where she broke ground as the nation's first network religion correspondent. For the next seven-and-a-half years, American viewers followed Peggy's award-winning push for truth into the faith-and-culture issues of U.S. presidents, gay marriage, prisoners, Muslim clerics, Rabbis, abortion, school shootings, academicians, missionaries … and in a particular coup, her hour-long special with the McCaughey parents and their new septuplets. In 2002, Peggy joined World Vision to help found and host the World Vision Report—a weekend newsmagazine and...

WHISPERS WITH BIAS ....would be Rocco Palmo's Indian name. ... He reports on a blessing ceremony at the Cathedral of Vienna, where homosexuals where also blessed. His account, however, deliberate or not, is not quite accurate in the most crucial question. OK, it seems that St. Blog's will want some 'splaining on this one.... Gay couples were apparently included in the Valentine's Day liturgy at the Stephansdom in Vienna, and it's being hung around Schonborn's neck like an albatross. Well. Schoen langsam, Rocco. I've read the German article. What happened? Valentine's Day blessings (not a Mass) for "people in love",...

By Al Knight Denver Post Columnist It's been hard lately to ignore the fact that major elements in the electronic news media have stopped concentrating on the collection of information, and have instead focused on predicting the future. It's not a good choice. For one thing, foretelling the future is a really tough job and most journalists have no obvious qualifications for the task.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." -- Old adage "Well, there you go again." -- Ronald Reagan There they go indeed. And shame on anyone for believing them anymore. I mean, of course, the elite liberal media, who will stop at nothing to topple the Bush presidency. Not even if it means manipulating the news about war and natural disasters. Remember all those New Orleans horror stories, the ones that could've given Attila the Hun goosebumps? An Editor & Publisher headline that screamed, "Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane"?...

AQABA, Jordan — Jordanian police rounded up several people Saturday and uncovered the launcher used by militants to fire three Katyusha (search) rockets from a hilltop warehouse the day before, narrowly missing a U.S. Navy ship docked in this Red Sea resort.

As an American journalist working in Moscow, Paul Klebnikov, accumulated a lengthy list of enemies, ranging from Chechen mobsters to billionaire bandits. Those responsible for his murder last year may not have realized just how many allies Klebnikov also had. A team of top-flight investigative reporters from America and Russia has committed itself to untangling the case of Klebnikov, the 41-year-old editor of Forbes Russia who was gunned down at the peak of his career while walking home from his offices in northeastern Moscow on the evening of July 9.

Immigration is a line-in-the-sand story topic that tends to raise the emotions of Americans on either side of the issue, particularly in light of 9/11. Consequently, it's imperative that any story on the subject be reported accurately and with balance, lest the readers' representative get calls and e-mails charging bias. On that note, I've already heard from readers regarding the stories about the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and their plans to send observers to Houston in October to patrol for illegal immigrants. Two specific complaints stand out: The use of the word "militia" in a subhead on a story published...

NEW YORK - Only CNN's Miles O'Brien and NASA truly know how close he was to climbing out of a space suit instead of an anchor booth after the space shuttle Discovery's launch was postponed last week because of a fuel gauge failure. O'Brien recently revealed that he was close to getting NASA's OK to be the first American journalist in space until Columbia broke apart on its return flight in 2003. CNN and O'Brien missed out on the story of a lifetime. But the network's negotiations with America's space agency also raise questions about whether CNN was willing to...

It’s always interesting to see how the elite media reacts when notable events take place. It is also interesting to see what events they choose to ignore. It is by their choice of what to focus on and what to disregard that they sculpt and influence public opinion. It is also how they create angst in the political world. In the hands of an up-front and honest media this would more often than not promote a public good. In the hands of an agenda driven media it becomes quite a problem. It wasn’t until the Afghan campaign was well established...

Many commented on the fact that, on the day of the London bombings, the BBC referred over and over again to these acts as terrorism and to the perpetrators as terrorists. This was in striking contrast to its refusal to use the term terrorist when reporting terrorism in Israel. When a bus full of innocent people was blown up in Bloomsbury, it seemed, the perpetrator was a terrorist but when a bus full of innocent people was blown up in Jerusalem the perpetrator was a ‘militant’ or even ‘fighter’. Now, however, it seems that the BBC has had second thoughts...