Waging a war of words

A running six-week battle between bloggers and the Associated Press over the wire service’s report of sectarian violence in Iraq has ended – for now.

The feud, which got plenty of traffic on the Web but very little coverage in mainstream news outlets, came to an abrupt halt last week.

That’s when Iraq’s Interior Ministry finally confirmed that Jamil Hussein, the AP’s source on a story about six Sunnis being attacked and burned to death by Shiites at a mosque in November, is an Iraqi police captain. The ministry now says Hussein, who apparently has not talked to other media, could face imprisonment for talking to the AP.

Until then, the ministry and the U.S. military had vigorously maintained that there was no Iraqi policeman by that name. Those denials fueled attacks on the AP’s reporting by conservative bloggers, who said it was evidence that the media are not only painting a darker picture than exists in Iraq but also perhaps a fake one.

Because Hussein has been the AP’s source for other coverage, bloggers said it called into question the veracity of more AP stories. Other bloggers joined in, questioning why the news agency had not produced its source. Several bloggers say the AP refused to talk to them.

On Dec. 8, AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll issued a statement in which she referred to online critics, saying “a small number of them have whipped themselves into an indignant lather over the AP’s reporting. Their assertions that the AP has been duped or worse are unfounded and just plain wrong.”

After Iraqi officials confirmed Hussein’s identity, Carroll told the trade publication Editor & Publisher, “I never quite understood why people chose to disbelieve us about this particular man on this particular story.”

But experts say it’s simple: Bloggers and mainstream media outlets have a mutual distrust for each other. And in this case, they say, both made inevitable mistakes that are bound to happen as new media and old struggle to carve out turf in the new information age.

The AP’s strident defense shows that when mainstream media are attacked, “they are still their own worst enemy: They call for openness, but they can’t seem to practice what they preach,” says Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

Roy Clark, who teaches at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in Florida, says the drumbeat by bloggers against the AP points to their “master narrative … that journalists are blind to the left-wing bias.”

Clark says: “I don’t deny that they may be right in certain cases. But if there is blindness on the left, there are too often hallucinations on the right. What we have now is not skepticism but a corrosive cynicism that sees secret agendas where there are none, a poisonous predisposition that cannot be neutralized, even with the most persuasive evidence.”

Eason Jordan, a former CNN executive who now runs a Web site devoted to Iraq called Iraqslogger.com, says he is “relieved” for the AP that Iraqi officials confirmed Hussein’s existence. But, he says, “all parties in this could have handled this better, starting with the Iraqi and U.S. government stating flat-out that Hussein did not exist. That set off the whole controversy.”

Before last Thursday’s announcement about Hussein’s identity, Michelle Malkin, a conservative blogger ( www.michellemalkin.com) who led the charge against the AP, had planned to travel to Iraq to look into the Hussein story.

She left anyway with a colleague on Saturday. She told USA Today before her departure that she hopes that Hussein “will talk to journalists other than those employed by the Associated Press about the incidents he has witnessed across Iraq” and that she intends to “do as much on-the-ground reporting as we can to nail down still-unresolved questions. And we are looking forward to reporting firsthand on the security situation in Iraq.”

“It’s not that I have some sort of animus toward the mainstream media,” says Malkin, who also writes a syndicated column appearing in 200 newspapers. “My interest is in making sure that they live up to the standards that they exact for themselves and that they seem to want to expect from bloggers who are part of new media.”

The danger of reporting in Iraq was underscored last week when an AP staffer who was missing six days had been found dead, the fourth AP employee to die in Iraq.

In the Hussein affair, AP spokeswoman Linda Wagner says, “we may have conveyed frustration about whether our critics fully appreciate the challenges facing journalists trying to get at the truth in Baghdad.

“However, we took their questions seriously and invested significant news resources to get at the facts as quickly and thoroughly as we could.”

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor who blogs (www.pressthink.org), says the events of the past six weeks should serve as a cautionary tale to old and new media alike. “Hold your fire if you’re making accusations – and hold your fire if you are standing by your story,” Rosen says.