Shoddy Merchandise

Jules Crittenden takes a very hard look at the reporting that the Associated Press has been providing from Iraq in recent days and calls it shoddy - at best. Curt from Flopping Aces is given full credit for his detective work on the imaginary police captain that the AP quoted time and again.

When a company defrauds its customers, or delivers shoddy goods, the customers sooner or later are going to take their business elsewhere. But if that company has a virtual monopoly, and offers something its customers must have, they may have no choice but to keep taking it.
 
That’s when the customers, en masse, need to raise a stink. That’s when someone else with the resources needs to seriously consider whether the time is ripe to compete.
 
The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP.

Curt at Floppingaces, www.floppingaces2.blogspot.com, led the charge. He thought there was something strange about an AP report, and took a second look at it, then a third look. He and others blew the lid off it. The AP is making up war crimes. But the resulting stink in the blogosphere has barely wrinkled a nose in the mainstream press. The ethics-obsessed Poynter Institute seems to be oblivious to it.
 
It has to do with the AP’s Iraqi stringers and an oft-quoted Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein. Problem is, the Iraqi police say Capt. Hussein does not exist. The Iraqi police and U.S. military say an incident described in an AP report - Iraqi soldiers standing by as people were burned alive in a mosque - didn’t happen. Another AP-reported incident, U.S. soldiers shooting 11 civilians, also never happened, the military says.
 
When the AP was forced to acknowledge this situation, it did so in a story about a new Interior Ministry policy regarding false reports. The AP buried the fact that its own false report prompted this new policy.

As Crittenden points out, the AP is a virtual monopoly. The only way to get it to change is for its customers to raise hell. And frankly, if the AP does not change, the newspapers who rely on the service will be the ones to pay the price. Readership and revenues will continue to fall as the public turns away from AP reports and relies more heavily on the internet for news. So it is in the best interests of the AP's customers to put pressure on them to clean up their act.

Other Links to this Post

1. Flopping Aces — Sunday, 3 December , 2006 @ 12:11 pm

2. Wake up America>Media Lies Uncovered — Sunday, 3 December , 2006 @ 12:17 pm

3. Doug Ross @ Journal — Sunday, 3 December , 2006 @ 2:49 pm