>>> Just another indication that western news are 0wned, even AFP.>>>
Alexander, this manipulation isn’t from yesterday, but from as early as 1950. Known as “Operation Mockingbird”, it was a secret CIA campaign to influence the nedia.
Wiki wrote,”In 1977, a “People” article by Alexander Butler alleged that one of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose foreign affairs articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by People Magazine to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop who headed the international bureau of New York Herald Tribune, Ben Bradlee foreign affairs correspondent for Newsweek, James Reston for the international section of the New York Times, Charles Douglas Jackson foreign photo-journalist for Time Magazine, and international correspondents such as Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Charles Bartlett of the Chattanooga Times and William C. Baggs and Herb Gold of The Miami News.[8] According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
Congressional hearings in 1976 proved CIA had been paying off editors and reporters in most mainstream media outlets
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

Posted by: www | Jun 22 2012 11:25 utc | 3

Isn’t lying representative of the new modern western man,one to whom facts,truth,justice and civility are foreign?I keep hearing in my head, Ray Davies singing,”I’m a 21st(sic)century man,but I don’t wanna be here.”

Posted by: dahoit | Jun 22 2012 12:45 utc | 5

The F16 that was just shot down is a somewhat bigger deal.

Posted by: Jim Steel | Jun 22 2012 13:26 utc | 7

>>> the u.s/the u.k/israel colluded to fabricate the story and there is no syrian pilot who defected.>>>
The pilot’s defection is much bigger and troubling news for Syria than the downed F4 (not F16, Jim). When Syrian Tv first announced it, it was the first time since 16 months that Syrian TV posts anything as “breaking news”. It began by breaking the news softly with “communications with one of Syria’s military planes was lost while it was on a training mission” An hour or so later, Syrian TV started talking about the “traitor that defected”. It’s understandable that the Syrians don’t want to keep this item in the news. After the Jordanian Cabinet approved the pilot’s request for political assylum, it was announced on Jordanian TV that the UK embassy was arranging to move the pilot to London. He’s probably there now.

Posted by: www | Jun 23 2012 5:59 utc | 9

I appreciate the informed scrutiny by b that led to AFP’s correction of its photo caption (which this AFP photo director’s tweet describes as the result of a mistake in the original).
I take AFP at its word in this case, but b’s post echoes similar thoughts raised in my mind as a result of writing this long post and comment thread about the Panjwai Massacre – an analysis which could doubtless benefit from similar close scrutiny by anyone interested. In Comments 13 and 16 I’ve detailed some key unanswered questions and conflicts that I believe are exposed by the media’s own reporting. (The lack of specifics in the captions of important March 11 photographs – including by AFP, which had an unnamed reporter and/or photographer on the ground very early – is one contributing cause of the unanswered questions.)
One example of something that could use more expert scrutiny than I can give it are the photographs of weapons carried by Panjwai soldiers that I link in the post (scroll down to the last photograph on the page), and comments (scroll down for the posed group shot of Bales with other soldiers, from which the Daily Mail enlarged the photograph of Bales holding his weapon), with regard to whether weaponlights (such as those sold by SureFire) are visible on the photographed weapons (and/or whether head lamps are visible on the helmets in the former, non-Bales photograph).
My suspicion is that there’s a significant amount of important early video and camera footage taken by Afghan reporters and photographers in Panjwai (while working for English-language media outlets), that has yet to see the light of day (through no fault of their own). The limited footage that has emerged – for example, this widely-published photograph of a grieving survivor who’s never been identified (but who could potentially be 20-year-old Jan Agha, whose family’s four deaths, as reported by Reuters, do not seem to be accounted for in the lists of the dead) – is very important to anyone trying to document what happened.
[Jon Stephenson of McClatchy (and New Zealand) – whose solid, skeptical reporting about the recent restaurant attack near Kabul is highlighted by b in Comment 10 above – happens to play a prominent role in the latter part of my comment section because of an ugly attack (regarding Panjwai reporting) launched against Australia’s DatelineSBS by the Australian public broadcaster ABC-TV – which remarks by Stephenson in NZ clearly helped trigger – and because of important subsequent reporting Stephenson did in mid-May about the murders in Alkozai.]

Posted by: pow wow | Jun 26 2012 5:00 utc | 11