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September 20, 2006

The Song That Never Ends

The amount of blatant fakery in news lately — staged photographs, altered photographs, invented sources, invented documents and the like — has gotten me to the point where now I can not trust the news any more than I can trust random anonymous commenters on the web. I figured I'd keep a catalog of such fakery that I run across, so that when I say things like "the media lies", I'd have a quick place to point people when they say "prove it". Feel free to contribute examples you've found. I'll bump and update as I find new instances.

This is the song that never ends
Yes, it goes on and on, my friends
Some people started singing it not knowing what it was,
And they'll continue singing it forever just because

This is the song that never ends
Yes, it goes on and on my friends
Some people started singing it not knowing what it was,
And they'll continue singing it forever just because —

In case they disappear from the web, the story links, in order, are:

Reuters publishes doctored photographs (fauxtographs?) of Israeli actions during the war in Lebanon, 2006.
Staged photographs from Reuters, AP and AFP of alleged child victims of Israeli attack on Qana, Lebanon, 2006.
NBC fakes footage of GM pickup truck with "sidesaddle" fuel tanks exploding. NBC had planted rockets underneath the truck to make it explode. 1993
CBS presents faked memos critical of President Bush's National Guard service, apparently in an effort to influence the upcoming 2004 presidential election.
"Pallywood", a documentary showing how Palestinians staged shots (including fake injuries and fake combat) and their use on CBS' 60 Minutes. Pallywood was made in 2005, but includes footage going back many years prior.
The Guardian cites section of Iraqi penal code as allowing anyone to kill homosexuals as an "honor killing", when the cited section actually is about depriving someone of their rights as a trustee of an estate. There is no apparent part of the Iraqi criminal code that allows killing of homosexuals or honor killings. This is an apparent attempt to make the Iraqi government look bad. 2006
Salon.com attempts to make it appear that President Bush skipped a National Guard physical because he was afraid of testing positive for drugs, quoting a non-existent regulation. 2004
The widely-quoted official from the Nixon and Reagan administrations, George Harleigh, doesn't apparently exist, and all links lead back to one source: Capitol Hill Blue. 2006

A veritable catalog of Reuters fakery — in categories! — from the Lebanon war of 2006, including some of the above-noted incidences as well as staged photographs with a wedding dress, other staged photographs with kids' toys, other staged photographs with people feigning death, and still more staged photos of people in front of various scenes of destruction (including one woman who appears to have spontaneously adopted the same pose on the loss of about six of her houses).
Eason Jordan admits shilling for Saddam Hussein, including just reprinting Iraqi propaganda, in order to maintain their Baghdad bureau. 2003
Jayson Blair exposed as having invented numerous reports for the New York Times. 2003
Journalist, having admitted in 2003 making up a story, lambastes blogs in 2006 for questioning the credibility of the media. In the process, the article that he wrote admitting making up a story is mysteriously edited.
AP story on speech given by SecDef Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly puts words in Rumsfeld's mouth, including words that could not be taken as a wild paraphrase, but which are quoted as if they were said in precisely those words. This is more subtle than most of the incidents of bad reporting that I am showing here, which means that it is also almost certainly more common. Essentially, the speech that is being reported on is not the one that was given, in any meaningful sense. 2006
An AP reporter, according to translated Iraqi documents, spied for Saddam against the inspectors looking for Iraqi WMD programs. 2000
Time's chief correspondent in South Vietnam during the Vietnam war was a Communist spy. His press credentials gave him access to US military bases and background briefings. 1960s and early 1970s

Posted by jeff at September 20, 2006 11:27 PM

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Comments

No need to approve the comment, just wanted to send you the link: http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/

Posted by: mrsizer at August 26, 2006 3:51 PM