Duncan Black, i.e. Atrios, at Eschaton thinks he has caught the Washington Post in manipulating news. He is wrong. It was not WaPo that changed the content presented under a certain web-link but Reuters. It also was most probably no bad intent, but dumb programming. Duncan avoids the real questions.
A story from the Washington Post website linked via Google news included the sentence:
Bleichwehl said troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory that produced "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches.
The current story at the Washington Post website under the same link (labeled U.S. air strike hits volatile Iraqi city Reuters Saturday, April 7, 2007; 9:14 AM) does not anymore include the sentence above but says:
The U.S. military said two U.S. soldiers died in separate roadside bombings in the east and west of Baghdad on Friday.
One of the bombs was an explosively formed projectile, a particularly deadly type of device which Washington accuses Iran of supplying Iraqi militants.
Of course EFPs are produced in Iraq while the media still blame Iran. I have quite a collection of source-links for this by now. So given the usual spin we experienced, Duncan’s suspicion that WaPo might have changed the news is not really far-fetched. But here, he is wrong.
First – this is not WaPo reporting, but a news agency report by Reuters. The dateline says so and the linked page also includes a Reuters logo at the end.
Second – when journalists edit agency stories they do change the label – usually to the reporter’s or the media’s name. Changing a pure agency report and then posting it under the agency’s label would violate various copyright laws and contract obligations. The incentive is just the other way. Journalists and their papers often change bits of text in agency reports just to be able to print it with their own label. They want to prove to the readership their own capacity. They hate to have to use agency labels.
Third – agencies often change their stories. It is not unusual to see five different versions coming in through the ticker with the same tags and headlines within a short timeframe. This especially is the case with developing reports on ongoing events like the current all-out kinetic attack the U.S. is running in Diwaniya. WaPo may well have taken the first original story, then changed to the second version, then to the fifth and maybe for some reason changed back to the fourth – happens all the time.
Checking Google news with "One of the bombs was an explosively formed projectile," a line from the first report, currently gives ten hits, all from various papers served with Reuters feeds plus Reuters itself.
Checking Google news with "troops, facing scattered resistance," a line from the second report, currently gives eleven links, all from various papers served with Reuters feeds plus Reuters itself.
Indeed Reuters India carries both stories. The first one with the correct EFP version and a timestamp of Sat Apr 7, 2007 7:17 AM IST is here, the second one with the "blame Iran" version and a timestamp of Sat Apr 7, 2007 9:30 PM IST is here.
But the second story is a bit smaller than the first one. It drops some information from the first dispatch but also includes important new facts, like the announcement of a new international ministerial meeting on Iraq.
WaPo replaced the Reuters story at the given URL with a new, updated / corrected version. Happens all the times on the web – I often correct at least spelling errors in my posts after their first lauch. I could and may add or delete some words for various non-nefarious reasons.
WaPo most probably has an automatic feed that pushes Reuters version changes of a story to the same WaPo link-address of the original one. I have programmed such an algorithm for a news site some years ago.
So, at least in this case, there is probably no ideological intent on WaPo’s side. On Reuter’s side this may have been an intended error. But this could also have been a mistake of marking a story as a version update, when it probably should have been marked as a new story. It’s a holiday – today’s Reuter crew is most likely a bunch of inexperienced interns.
Which is to say:
- Don’t assume intent when normal procedures and a bit of research explains such stuff.
- Why not concentrate on the real news content in both reports rather than hunt ghosts?
This from the second report in question:
U.S. forces launched an air strike in Diwaniya on Saturday as U.S. and Iraqi troops fought for a second day to wrest control of the city from Shi’ite militias.
A local hospital source and a resident said six people, including two children and a woman, were killed in the missile strike on a home in the centre of the city, 180 km south of Baghdad.
U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Bleichwehl said one person had been killed when a warplane fired on gunmen carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Hey Duncan:
Why does the U.S. attack Diwaniya, deep in the Shia south of Iraq, at all?
How many collaterals were hit?
Why are warplanes, instead of infantry, used against gunmen?
Now how about looking into that?