Media Passed On Massey's Lies

What's left of Jimmy Massey's honor died today, as the St. Louis Post Dispatch topped its front page with the lead story in a series that debunked the honorably discharged Marine's stories of attrocities by Marines in Iraq.

Here's the lead story, which begins:

For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.

In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey has told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians.

The only trouble with this story is that it's not true.

We've become so accustomed to the effects of bias in the media that we may forget to ask how the media could let Massey's stories of little girls shot in the head and trucks filled with massacred bodies go unchallenged. Fortunately, Ron Harris, who wrote the story, did remember this question.

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey's own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

In an accompanying story, Why did the press fall for Massey's stories, he shows just how poorly the media behaved on this story.

For example, Harris reports that AP carried three stories on Massey, including one based on a one-on-one interview.

But none of the AP reporters ever called Ravi Nessman, an Associated Press reporter who was embedded with Massey's unit. Nessman wrote more than 30 stories about the unit from the beginning of the war until April 15, after Baghdad had fallen.

Jack Stokes, a spokesman for the AP, said he didn't know why the reporters didn't talk to Nessman, nor could he explain why the AP ran stories without seeking a response from the Marine Corps. The organization also refused to allow Nessman to be interviewed for this story.

Come on, Jack, just admit the obvious. Had the story been something about how well things are going in Iraq, AP would have treated it skeptically and checked it out. But since the story supported the anti-military, anti-US, anti-war thinking of AP's reporters and editors, no one checked it out.

Or if they did, they kept the results secret.

As Michael Parks, director of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism and formerly LATimes editor, puts it:

"A reporter's obligation is to check the allegation, to seek comment from the organization that's accused. They can't let allegations lie on the table, unchecked or unchallenged. When they don't do that, it's a clear disservice to the reader."

h/t memeorandum