The New York Times Caught Out....Again

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Late last night, the New York Times decided to run a story alleging major ballot fraud on the eve of the Iraqi elections:

“Less than two days before nationwide elections, the Iraqi border police seized a tanker on Tuesday that had just crossed from Iran filled with thousands of forged ballots, an official at the Interior Ministry said. The tanker was seized in the evening by agents with the American-trained border protection force at the Iraqi town of Badra, after crossing at Munthirya on the Iraqi border, the official said. According to the Iraqi official, the border police found several thousand partly completed ballots inside. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the Iranian truck driver told the police under interrogation that at least three other trucks filled with ballots had crossed from Iran at different spots along the border.

The seizure of the truck comes at a delicate time in Iran's relations with both Iraq and the United States. The American government has said Iranian agents are deeply involved in trying to influence events in Iraq, by funneling money to Shiite political parties and by arming and training many of the illegal militias that are bedeviling the country"

But there is one problem with the Times article... the single-sourced story appears to be totally false:

"The head of Iraq's border guards denied police reports on Wednesday that a tanker truck stuffed with thousands of forged ballot papers had been seized crossing into Iraq from Iran before Thursday's elections.

"This is all a lie," said Lieutenant General Ahmed al-Khafaji, the chief of the U.S.-trained force which has responsibility for all Iraq's borders.

"I heard this yesterday and I checked all the border crossings right away. The borders are all closed anyway," he told Reuters."

Ed Morrissey gets the story from The Confederate Yanke, and weighs in:

"Now this would be quite a story, if true. The Iranians want to see a Shi'ite-dominated government rise up from the ashes of Saddam's Sunni-led military dictatorship, presumably one that can get warped into a theocracy that would bring the Kurds and the Sunni under their heel. The Kurds feel reasonably autonomous now and probably do not have too many worries about this, but the Sunni -- already suspicious of the Shi'ites and their thirst for revenge -- will be ready to believe the worst. This development could undermine the entire election process and put Sunni intransigence back into high gear ... if it was true."

Michelle Malkin has the story:

"...On the side of a single, anonymous source who apparently enlisted Times reporter Dexter Filkins' help to fraudulently discredit the Iraqi elections, Bob Owens reports.

Ed Morrissey @ Captain's Quarters delivers the blow:

"Oops!  I guess Dexter Filkins and the several layers of editors at the Paper Of Record^TM didn't think to check out the well-reported fact that the roads in and out of Iraq on both the Iranian and Syrian borders had been closed. That makes it pretty difficult for eighteen-wheelers to sneak in and out of the country. They tend to get bogged down in the sand and dirt otherwise, making it hard to put the ballots into the polling places. And how exactly were these tankers supposed to get the ballots into the boxes anyway -- pump them into election stations with a hose? The boxes are watched by election judges and a few thousand outside auditors.

It turns out that Filkins' source either works for the Defense ministry's intelligence unit or passed along a rumor that got sourced from there. Stories based on anonymous, single sources can do tremendous damage, especially to a reporter's reputation and that of his newspaper. Perhaps the Gray Lady should think about that before jumping in with both feet to repeat stupid and easily-debunked urban legends such as these."

Same old story, different subject....Ending on a good note, they do have another journalist on the ground.

UPDATE AP picks up on it adding that The Iraqi Interior Minister Jabor, accused The New York Times of attempting to discredit the process. As if...

On a slightly different note Betsy's page slamdunks Newsweek, and has decided to finally cancell her subscription.

AND FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN THE KNOW, WHAT THE HELL IS THE BARRETT REPORT? AND JUST WHEN DID THE DEMS START CALLING BUSH A LIAR?

Linked with Memeorandum Jay @  Stop The ACLU  The Belmont Club The Strata-Sphere, Right Wing Nut House The Law Hawk is wandering....

Comments

[Kenny Pierce]

Jess,

1. I'm humbly flattered.

2. I'm so not qualified.

So I don't think I'll be the next Oswald Chambers; but I'm very humbly glad you found the integrity comment helpful.

[Kenny Pierce]

Stefan,

It mattered to me. I still don't really follow the point of Semanticleo's allusion, though...I hope he hasn't abandoned us for good because if he won't explain it, curiosity is going to force me to track down that movie and watch it, and since it's pretty obscure that could be difficult.

I like Danny Kaye, though. (And The Court Jester comes with a bonus in the form of a leading lady whom I would not have thought of as a hottie, having previously met up with her only in films from her more mature years...and that's MY obscure Danny Kaye reference contribution to the thread; so release the Google hounds!).

And a bonus obscure Danny Kaye reference -- isn't he a punch line in one of Ellen DeGenere's hilarious riffs on how much she hates Trivial Pursuit?

[Alexandra]

Thanks Stefan, yes it kinda mattered to me, so I appreciate you doing that.

Semeticleo has not returned to expalin himself, as I hazzard a guess he cannot now.

And yes I am a self confessed Christian who appreciates Jews, and?

[jess1dering]

Thanks Stefan ! Think Semanticleo will come back and give the movie line a chance to be fully realized? SEMANTIC LEO....................YOOOOOOHOOOOOO..??????

[Stefan]

Ok here is the deal with the “Yakobovsky” line. It is referring to the 1958 comedic movie “Me and the Colonel” (as Kenny correctly stated) adapted from the play by Franz Werfel called “Yakobovsky and the Colonel”. It is set in 1939 Poland and it stars Danny Kaye as Yakobovsky, a timid but clever Jewish guy, and Gurd Jurgen as an aristocratic Polish Officer (Col. Prokoszny) who is not all too fond of Jews. Yakobovsky is trying to flee the Germans and Col. Prokoszny is trying to get some papers to England. They team up in one of those “unlikely pair” type comedic situations. A reoccurring line in the movie is the Colonel saying: “More and more I dislike this Yakobovsky”. Yakobovsky is very clever and resourceful and ends up keeping the pair alive through the story and at the end the Colonel starts changes his tune saying: “More and more I like this Yakobovsky”. There you go. Not that anyone cares at this point so …Whoop Dee Doo!!!

[Stefan]

FYI: Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist
Story Via Drudge Report: http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6664

[jess1dering]

Kenny, You are an amazingly gracious soul and , I might add, a credit to your wonderful father. Your definition of integrity is much more in keeping with it's actual meaning than 'the same on the inside as on the outside' is/was. Your comment is enlightening and thought provoking and convicting. Thanks for your, as always ,for your generous response......................PS. I wish you would consider writing a daily meditation book something like Oswald Chamber's ' My Utmost for His Highest' but for our time. When I say 'our time' I mean these years wherein so many have forgotten what timeless virtues are all about, how they express themselves in our daily lives and how they benefit us. What do you think....?

[Kenny Pierce]

Jess,

Why, pray tell , do you deem laziness and integrity to be mutually exclusive?

Because getting your insides to match your outside is bloody hard work -- especially because we naturally go to so much work to hide our insides from ourselves.

I imagine that I'm using the term integrity idiosyncractically. My own usage is not necessarily that typical; in trying to think out a way to express the moral principles I learned from observation of my father (a man of tremendous integrity in every respect, I might add), I arrived at a concept that I needed to express and for which "integrity" seemed to be about the closest match. That doesn't mean that anybody else uses the term exactly the way I do.

Integrity (in my usage) is, essentially, wholeness; and wholeness (in all the important arenas) does not come without effort.

Intellectual integrity involves subjecting the arguments that claim to prove what you want to believe, to the same critical scrutiny that you would apply to arguments that claim to prove what you don't want to believe; it means that you apply the same intellectual standards throughout your belief systems without stacking the deck wherever it suits you. The reason this is hard work is simply that our subconscious goes to immense amounts of trouble to keep us from seeing that we're stacking the deck. If you are intellectually lazy then you simply will lie to yourself, and subsequently to others, as surely as the sun will rise in the east.

Artistic integrity means going into every corner of your work of art and flushing out all of the touches that are out of synch with the unifying theme and spirit of the work, and bringing them into harmony with the work as a whole. Once the hack has something that will sell, he is done. But the mark of the true artist (even those of us who regrettably lack talent) is that he does not believe in the principle of diminishing returns. That is, he can't make himself say, "That problem is too small to be worth fixing." He therefore has to revisit the work again and again until even the smallest element plays its proper role in the whole. Commercialism is the enemy of artistic integrity only because it subjects the art to the motivation of its being profitable rather than to the motivation of its being its true self; where an artist is able to maintain the wholeness of the work and still have something people will pay lots of money for, he simply becomes a very rich artist of unsullied integrity (at least as far as that particular work of art goes).

Even "integrity" in its everyday sense of honesty is hard work. I can take the same set of facts, relate those facts without "telling a lie," and yet generate two radically different sets of impressions, simply by choosing words whose denotations are appropriate but whose connotations slant the listener's reaction in the direction I desire. I can choose the facts that are "important" and leave out the others. Where I know that it is to my advantage to have my listener react a certain way, the subconscious pressure to choose my words carefully in order to paint the picture I want him to have rather than the picture I have myself, can be overwhelming. And I should choose my words carefully -- but I should choose words that will accurately reflect my own perception of the events, whereas I am likely carefully to choose words that will effectively cause the listener to perceive the events in the manner most useful to myself. If the perception I attempt to create in the listener does not match the perception I have within my own private mind, because I have allowed myself to give a poor and misleading presentation, then this is a failure of integrity. (Of course, if I am deliberately deceiving somebody then integrity is not so much the issue; then the question is simply whether the lie I am telling is morally admissible, for example when Christian Dutchmen lied to the Gestapo and told them no Jews were hiding in the house.) Because communication is a tricky and delicate thing, monitoring your own speech to make sure that you are not taking the easy road when the facts are not as you would like them to be, is hard work; and lazy people won't bother.

Finally, moral integrity is a matter of ensuring that you do not ever, even in small matters, act "out of character" -- that is, that your moral life is of one single piece throughout. If you are careful to tell the truth on big things but you let lots of little white lies go by because those little things just don't matter enough to go to the trouble, then that is a failure of moral integrity. You can see that a lazy person will frequently decide it's too much trouble to live up to his code, and therefore that moral integrity is beyond any realistic aspirations of lazy persons.

Does that help make what I meant a bit more clear? I apologize very sincerely for dropping one of my own privately redefined words into a public discussion without any warning or clarification.

[Kenny Pierce]

Darrell,

Danny Kaye played a freedom-loving, Nazi-persecuted Jew named Jacobovsky in Me and the Colonel but I have no idea what the specific quote would refer to. I don't think Semanticleo intended it as an insult to Alexandra; the post seemed to me to be mostly insulting to the Times. I suppose I could have that wrong.

[Darrell]

It's a line from a movie...
It's probably "Jacobovsky"
I keep getting an image of Danny Kaye saying it.
Can anyone fill in the blanks?

[jess1dering]

North by Northwest, Me thinks there are a number of us waiting for a reply to your question. Semanticleo??

[North by Northwest]

More, and more I dislike this Yacobovsky!

Tell me Semanticleo, or for that matter anyone else, what is meant by this phrase? Why the insult or backhanded slight delivered with desdain?

[jess1dering]

I still can not believe that the NYT's deliberately misrepresented the words of a young patriot : one who WILLINGLY GAVE HIS LIFE because he so appreciated that brave patriots before him and done so for freedom. They completely misused a letter written by a brave young man who gave his LIFE in service to his country. I can't believe what the press has come to. Apparently the reciepient of this letter was completely unrepentant and smug in regards to this incident. God, I'd love to see them exposed and held accountable.

[Darrell]

Just how many similar "errors" have come before? Could this be some sort of 'agenda?' Heavens!

We all know the truth.

[jess1dering]

Kenny Pierce, sometimes I am just as dumb as a rock until another good soul opens my eyes for me. Why, pray tell , do you deem laziness and integrity to be mutually exclusive ? If your lazy and lump-lump through life , representing yourself as lump-lump lazy, well, then don't you have integrity ? Perhaps it's my understanding of integrity that's the problem. I figure if your insides match your outsides ( you know what I mean..? ) then you've got integrity. Now a lazy journalist- that's a lack of integrity !!

[jess1dering]

This New York Times Treasonous-News Story still breaks my heart. I know it's a tad bit long, but please let me know if you don't find this story to be a breathtaking betrayal.

Friday, October 28, 2005
EDITOR ASKED TO EXPLAIN EDITING

Lisa Huang Fleischman writes to New York Times public
editor Byron Calame:

Mr. Calame—I’ve never bothered to write the NY
Times before, because your paper seems to make a
practice of sinking to new lows every time I look,
although I admit I, like many others, hardly ever look
anymore. But this last was really contemptible.

Your paper profiled Cpl. Jeffrey Starr in an
article about the 2000th casualty (of course). Here’s
the article.

The paper quotes from a letter written by Cpl
Starr to his girlfriend, found after his death by
Starr’s father. The erstwhile paper of record states:

"Sifting through Corporal Starr’s laptop computer
after his death, his father found a letter to be
delivered to the marine’s girlfriend. ‘I kind of
predicted this,’ Corporal Starr wrote of his own
death. ‘A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my
chances.’"

Perfectly in keeping, may I say, with the
defeatist, elegiac, Vietnam-like attitude of the
entire piece.

I’m sorry to say that the Times reporter
dishonestly deleted the rest of the letter. Thanks to
the brave corporal’s family, who forwarded the
remainder of the letter to Michelle Malkin, we
actually know what Corporal Starr really thought, not
what the Times would like to use him to stand for.

Here’s what the rest of the letter says.

He wrote: “Obviously if you are reading this then
I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is
why I’m writing this in November. A third time just
seemed like I’m pushing my chances. I don’t regret
going, everybody dies but few get to do it for
something as important as freedom. It may seem
confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here
helping these people, so that they can live the way we
live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious
dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To
me that is why I died. Others have died for my
freedom, now this is my mark."

(Emphasis mine—it’s the part that your reporter
knowingly left out. Which only goes to show that
everything—EVERYTHING—at the Times is in service of
The Agenda.)

I know it just kills you guys to think that
overwhelmingly our soldiers actually, consciously
support the war, are perfectly aware of the dangers
they face, and are as perfectly prepared to face them.
I know it comforts all the Timesmen and women to think
that soldiers are just sad, pathetic, barely literate
dupes (when they aren’t being babykillers and Koran
flushers), but in fact the soldiers view their lives
as imbued with transcendent meaning, apparently
something no Times reporter can claim. Maybe it’s just
envy on the part of all your reporters that these
American teenagers in uniform make history every day
of their lives, while you all just continue to
transparently twist the news and to accumulate
contempt from the American people, which is now
compounding at a daily rate.

Incidentally, I was a reserve army officer for
twelve years. Sad, pathetic dupe that I am, I
graduated Berkeley and Columbia Law School. (I
understand you have a few Columbia J-School grads
among your staff. Too bad. Everyone on campus knew
that only the really dumb kids ended up in the
J-School.)

Mr. Calame has a question or two to answer.

Posted by: jess1dering | Wednesday, December 14, 2005 at 11:35 PM

I still can not believe that the NYT's deliberately misrepresented the words of a young patriot : one who WILLINGLY GAVE HIS LIFE because he so appreciated that brave patriots before him and done so for freedom. They completely misused a letter written by a brave young man who gave his LIFE in service to his country. I can't believe what the press has come to. Apparently the reciepient of this letter was completely unrepentant and smug in regards to this incident. God, I'd love to see them exposed and held accountable for their very real lies.

[Stefan]

Oh yea I almost forgot!! I don’t know where to post this but in case any of you clever folks are interested; Pajamas Media (www.pajamasmedia.com) has a "network" of reporters (Iraqi citizens I believe) including the guys from “Iraq the Model” blog (iraqthemodel.blogspot.com) who will be trying to issue reports on the Iraqi election throughout the night and day. Might be interesting if it works out OK. It is a bit of an experiment.

[Kenny Pierce]

For people who watch cable news in order to know what's going on in Iraq, an absolutely indispensable post is Michael Yon's "And now, for the rest of the story...", in which Michael spells out for us exactly how the news media goes about the logistics of reporting from Iraq. Those of us who remember the grotesque inaccuracy of the New Orleans / Katrina reporting will have our suspicions about how dissimilar from Michael's description even the reporting outside of Iraq might be. Michael -- who would be a slam-dunk for a Pulitzer if the Pulitzer actually had a single damn thing in the world to do with journalistic excellence -- pulls no punches:

From a media executive's perspective, where the CFO can occupy the same tier on the organizational chart as the managing editor, the math is easy: send a dozen journalists to Iraq, or hire one cheaply to live in Baghdad. The media gets a bargain rate on instant credibility from their "embedded journalist in the heart of the Sunni Triangle," who spends a few minutes a day paraphrasing [the military's] media releases, then heads downstairs for a beer at the hotel bar.

"Lazy," Stefan, is precisely le mot juste. But then, integrity of any sort is not possible for the lazy -- intellectual, journalistic, artistic, you name it. If you're lazy, then integrity is something you can't even comprehend, much less actually aspire to achieving.

[Stefan]

Here is the real secret to the epidemic of half-assed reporting (there is bias involved as well but…): reporters are LAZY!!! They have their pentagon sources, state department sources, military sources, Iraqi sources, etc, etc. and when they want a story they don’t even leave the damn newsroom any more they just pick up the phone get a statement, comment, or “scoop”, print it and go home. Real reporting is difficult, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous and so many reporters just regurgitate crap. They have their little networks (usually picked to fit the reporter’s political tastes) and they use them year in and year out. That is why news coming from “sources” is so monotonously predictable from story to story. If they can’t find someone to say what they want well, sometimes they take a bit of creative license. After all, if a reporter has a gut feeling that Halliburton is really a front for a wicked race of space aliens then why let a minor detail like actual documentation get in the way of the Pulitzer?

[jeff stiles]

And a single ANONYMOUS source, I should add, Kenny!

[Kenny Pierce]

It didn't strike me at first blush as particular evidence of the Grey Lady's admittedly undisguised desire to make the U.S. military look like failures, though I can see that angle. Mostly I just thought (along with Semanticleo, it seems), "Good God, verily do I believe that any half-decent high school journalism class could outdo that paper at reliability and journalistic professionalism." I mean, how does a professional fall for that story without more than a single source? It's just not going to be long before we have to start asking ourselves, really, how many big-city newspapers are left in America as incompetent as the New York Times.

What a complete passle of jackasses. Too bad Balaam's ass has gone on to her reward already; they could upgrade their talent while still meeting the demands of nepotism...

[Jeremiah]

This Edward Wong article is consistent in tone with his other Times pieces. I dare say he's anti-American. Have you ever seen him on a television news program? He's quite bland.

[jeff stiles]

Oh yeah, by the way, the correct spelling is "asinine." :)

[jeff stiles]

How the heck was Alexandra "misinterpreting" your words, Semanticleo? She was simply responding to a confusing post you made that is still above, in black and white. I don't think she sounded "antagonized" in her response at all -- she was just trying to understand what in the world you were talking about!

[Stefan]

Kinda like the 60 minutes II deal with the falsified documents. The MSM still defends it by saying: "Yes, the documents were false but the story was still true." EH????

[Huan]

When the NYT relinquishes journalistic principles, like checking their sources and independently verifying the report, you have to question their motives.

[Alexandra]

"More, and more I dislike this Yacobovsky!"

As you think that I have misunderstood you, would you perhaps like to tell me what you meant by that, because again I have no idea, but it intrigues me, it sounded like a compliment to someone somewhere?

[Semanticleo]

Alex,

I've obviously said too much already. I've no wish to antagonize you with words that are destined to be misinterpreted.

[Alexandra]

Semanticleo,

I actually don't know what you are talking about. What conspiracy? The journalist falsified a story, what you are talking about I have no idea. This is about bad journalism and a fraudulent story which the NYT jumped on. Where are you going with this, I just don't understand.

Are you saying the journalist's report was true? I am at a loss, you are going off on a tangent. What idiocy, the idiocy of the guy falsifying the story, what?

No one thought the original story was stupid and everyone wrote about it. It is discovered to be fraudulent, as usual the left belittle it as with all the stories where someone gets discovered who bats for the left. When the tables are turned the left has all the right to call anything a conspiracy.

As I said the story is always the same. It's idiotic now that he's been discovered, and you belittle it, but the idiot's original story was not idiotic right? Yeah right.

[Semanticleo]

Yours is a point of selective perception.

Mine is the stupidity of the premise, followed by the idiocy of going with a one-source story based upon the idiocy. Again, I repeat who could swallow this assinine tripe with a straight face?
And to sound the clarion call to a possible conspiracy by enemies of freedom?(whoever those unnamed persons are). More, and more I dislike this Yacobovsky!

[Huan]

nice post.
NYT is not journalism, it is propaganda.

[jeff stiles]

And it has EVERYTHING to do with the credibility of the New York Times!

[Alexandra]

One that would like to undermine the elections.

"This development could undermine the entire election process and put Sunni intransigence back into high gear ... if it was true."

This is nothing to do with engineering the election results.

[Semanticleo]

My goodness, what kind of idiot would plant a story as non-sensical as Iran (Shiite) needing to engineer an election result where the Shiite population is 66%, whereas the Sunni is 29%?