News Flash — Thomas Lifson Finds an Error in a Caption!!!
An entry on the American Thinker blog would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad.
It seems the blogger is so desperate to show how just gosh-darn awful the mainstream media is — especially The New York Times — that he bends over backwards, exaggerates, and brings in all the earthmoving equipment he has to build a mountain from a molehill.
Here’s the “scoop”:
On Jan. 14, the Times ran an image from the AFP wire service (Agence France-Presse) of a boy and an old man in the ruins of their home in Pakistan with a caption, “Pakistani men with the remains of a missile fired at a house in the Bajur tribal zone near the Afghan border.”
It turns out the caption was in error. The people are not standing with the remains of a missile; it’s actually an unexploded artillery shell, and whoever was on the Times’s copy desk at the time didn’t know the difference. Okey doke, that kind of stuff happens; papers will run the caption provided by the wire service, and sometimes they’re wrong, or copy editors will screw up.
But far be it for some bloggers to say, “Whoops.” Instead, they’ve decided they’ve found a vast conspiracy!
In an entry titled, “Photo fakery at the New York Times,” Thomas Lifson (he’s both the editor and publisher of the American Thinker) writes:
It appears that the Times, once-upon-a-time regarded as the last word in reliability when it comes to checking before publishing (which makes them so much better than blogs, of course), has run a fake photo on the home page of its website. The photo has since been removed from the home page, but still can be seen here.
It’s not an error, you see. It’s a fake. “Fake,” implying of course, that it was staged with actors, or somehow misrepresents what happened. (For example, the video of Iraqis taking down the statue of Saddam — that was faked to appear as if hordes of people were there cheering, when in fact it was a handful doing the job, in an area cordoned-off by the US military. But I digress.)
In the real world, it was an incorrect caption. A dumb mistake, but a real photo mislabeled.
But Lifson is not to be deterred. He never explains why it’s a “fake,” as opposed to simply poorly captioned, Instead, paragraph after paragraph, he quotes military experts or aficionados explaining in detail why the image is not that of a missile. Writes one:
At a glance, it’s hard to tell the exact caliber — 152mm or 155mm (they’re so close) but the Soviets tended to favor 152 (going back to WW-II) while we and the Brits, the French and most of the rest of the non-Soviet world (including, oddly, the PRC) preferred the 155. For all intents and purposes, they were functionally identical (but were not interchangeable).
And on and on. And on and on and on, all to prove — mercy me! — that the caption was wrong.
See, if you go into excruciating, unnecessary detail about why this isn’t a missile, it takes attention away from the small size of the problem — an error in the caption. But Lifson doesn’t seem to care; he’s more interested in assuming malice, rather than using Occam’s Razor to realize that it’s an error in a caption.
I can imagine this conversation with him:
Me: Tom, I’m going to the deli on 5th. Want anything?
Lifson: There’s no deli on 5th. It’s on 6th.
Me: Oh, yeah, you’re right.
Lifson: Why did you lie to me? Were you trying to steal my money?
Me: Huh? No. I forgot which street it was on.
Lifson: See, 5th has the laundry, then the architects’ firm, then the Mexican place.
Me: I know. I said I made a mistake.
Lifson: No, you lied. Here, here’s a map. The deli’s on 6th because it’s across from the Post Office.
Me: OK, OK. I made a mistake.
Lifson: No, you lied to steal my money. Let me ask some other people where the deli is…
You get the picture. Not once does he explain how it’s a “fake,” or why he used such a loaded term. Of course not.
So Lifson and his kin will jump up and down, pat one another on the back and crow about how they unearthed a vast, left-wing conspiracy by the AFP and Getty Images (and later the Times) to foist on an unsuspecting public a mislabeled image.
Tomorrow, I suppose, they’ll find unAmerican activities lurking in a spelling error.
More: Oh, this gets better. On page two of his earth-shattering report, Lifson goes completely off the deep end and into the realm of wild speculation.
No, the Times didn’t just mislabel a caption, it was covering up a villager’s secret supply of bombs that might be used to lob sarin gas at US troops! He quotes his “security affairs correspondent,” Doug Hanson:
Not only did the NYT get caught in another lie, but they may have unintentionally revealed the village’s cache of IED ordnance. During the Intifada against Israel that started in September of 2000, terrorists in Gaza used unexploded artillery projectiles wired as command detonated landmines. Even the heaviest Merkava main battle tanks could be taken out with these devices. Of course, command detonated artillery projectiles are one of the preferred types of IEDs used in Iraq by enemy forces. And, in 2004, troopers from the US 1st Cavalry Division encountered an IED made with a binary Sarin nerve agent 155mm artillery chemical round.
When presented with the liklihood that it’s a NATO practice round (and thus not terribly dangerous), Lifson is not to be deterred by the facts. See, it could be French and thus chock-full of high explosive:
Mr. Krulac notes that the blue color generally notes a training practice round, and it may very well be an inert projectile. But NATO markings do not apply to many other makers of 155mm ammunition including the French, who have been known to paint high explosive rounds of some of their ordnance blue.
[sigh] Maybe he needs a better aluminum foil hat.
More more: More commentary on this at the Mahablog.
Andrew says:
People don’t like to read things they disagree with. When that happens we tend to blame the messenger.
But a few members of the main stream media have made that a lot easier to lie in and we all have to pay for it. Dan Rather and company’s stunning lack of diligence is still feeding that fire a year after the fact. (For those of you I can now hear screaming, “The memo’s were real,” give me a break! Even in high school we new better then to use the wrong typewriter on the driver’s licenses we made. That’s forgery 101)
But even setting the high profile gaffs aside, there are times I look at what we air and what you print and shake my head in wonder. Sometimes it is overt disdain for the subject of their reports. The Court TV lady’s continual litany of personal comments about Michael Jackson during her reports from the trial is one example.
But there are thousands of examples of far more subtle, yet just as biased and opinion swaying mines in all forms of media. Here’s a great example from USA Today from the 2004 Campaign. This is part of a story on the preparations for the Vice Presidential Debate written by Bill Nichols. It ran Oct. 5, 2004:
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Aides say Edwards will try to follow running mate John Kerry’s example from last week’s debate with President Bush by drawing stark differences with the administration’s policy in Iraq and on key domestic issues. “There’s a wonderful opportunity to continue the contrast,” says Mike McCurry, a senior Kerry adviser.
Another likely Edwards strategy: Challenge Cheney’s assertions that Iraq had links to al-Qaeda. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Monday that he hadn’t seen “any strong, hard evidence” of such ties.
Cheney, his handlers say, believes he can bolster his ticket’s standing by charging that Kerry and Edwards lack the constancy to lead the war on terrorism. Cheney “won’t be fancy or funny or gimmicky,” says campaign adviser Mary Matalin. Cheney’s goal will be to show “why these first post-Cold War, post-9/11 policies will make us safer.”
(http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20041005/1a_lede05.art.htm)
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(I’m amazed that link still works, it’s getting a little old…)
So why is it that Edwards has Aides but Cheney has handlers? I looked up the definitions, and both are legitimate. Up until the story ran I didn’t know that handler was anymore then media slang for a high profile person’s assistants and/or agents.
Based on the write to a 10th grade reading level rule, I’m willing to bet that on some level better than 70% of the people reading that passage got the idea in their head that the reporter felt Cheney has to be handled.
I don’t know Mr. Nichols and can’t say what is his state of mind was when he wrote that. But what is sad is this story made it through at least one layer of editing before it made ink. This speaks volumes to the mindset of all involved in the editorial process on this story.
These are the kind of things that lead John Q Public to believe we in the media are actually propaganda machines forwarding whatever agenda their against. Until we clean up our act, getting away from “interpretive reporting” and find a way to clearly separate the editorial content from the hard news, there will be no such thing as a simple mistake. Each misquote will be used as a club to beat us for slanting the story against the aggrieved party.