BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Wednesday, May 19, 2004
FAKE RAPES AND LYING LIARS.
You will not be surprised to learn that the right is lying about the
Boston Globe's role in promulgating those fake photos of
American troops raping Iraqi women. The pictures were unveiled at a
news conference last week by Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner and
black-community activist Sadiki Kambon. Click here
and work backwards for the full story.
To recap briefly: the Globe
published an article about the news conference by reporter Donovan
Slack that conveyed great skepticism about the pictures, and that
quoted a military spokesman as saying the photos might well be an
Internet fraud. In fact, it turned out that WorldNetDaily.com
had already exposed them as frauds. Where the Globe
went wrong was in running a George Rizer photo of Turner and Kambon
in which the fake-rape pictures were clearly visible; and then, when
editors realized what a mistake they'd made after the first edition
rolled off the presses, shrinking the photo rather than removing it
altogether from subsequent editions.
A screw-up? Yes. A really bad
screw-up? Absolutely! But not the one that right-wingers wish
the Globe had made. That's not going to stop them,
though.
Here,
for instance, is Mark Steyn, taking a break from the hard work of
ridiculing
triple amputee Max Cleland:
In the last few days, the
Mirror, a raucous Fleet Street tabloid, has published pictures of
British troops urinating on Iraqi prisoners, and the Boston Globe,
a somnolent New England broadsheet, has published pictures of
American troops sexually abusing Iraqi women. In both cases, the
pictures turned out to be fake. From a cursory glance at the
details in the London snaps and the provenance of the Boston ones,
it should have been obvious to editors at both papers that they
were almost certainly false.
Yet they published them. Because
they wanted them to be true. Because it would bring them a
little closer to the head they really want to roll - George W.
Bush's.
Writing in National Review,
John O'Sullivan accuses
the Globe of "Willing Gullibility," adding:
Two newspapers - the
Daily Mirror in Britain and the Boston Globe in the
U.S. - have published fake photographs of British and American
soldiers abusing prisoners. In the British case the fakes were
quickly detected once they had been published, and in the American
case, they had been detected before the Globe
published them. Neither the media's vaunted "skepticism" nor
simple fact-checking on the internet were employed in either case
by the papers. The fakes were, in the old Fleet Street joke, "too
good to check." There was a rush to misjudgment.
On a right-wing website called
OpinionEditorials.com,
someone named Lee P Butler (no period, please!) blurts
out:
The mainstream media has
joined the attack of our military as The Boston Globe, a
subsidiary of The New York Times, published photos that show what
they said were American soldiers taking part in 'gang rapes' of
Iraqi women without ever verifying their authenticity. They have
since been proven to be pictures taken from an internet porn site.
The newspaper has since given what they consider an apology but
still refuses to accept their own complicity.
I'm sure I could find more examples
if I kept looking.
Of course, none of these accounts
is even remotely accurate, but they follow one of the right's
favorite scripts: that the liberal media - in this case, the
Globe - so hate America that they eagerly seize upon dubious
claims of heinous behavior on the part of US soldiers. It doesn't
matter that the Globe reported no such thing. It doesn't
matter that the paper didn't "publish" the fake pictures, instead
accidentally capturing them in a photo of Turner and Kambon. (And
before you dismiss my contention that it was an accident, ask
yourself if you really believe that any mainstream-newspaper editor
would knowingly run graphic photos of oral sex and gang rape.
Pause. Okay, you've got your answer, don't you?)
The right has its lies and myths to
promote. And it will never, ever let the truth stand in the
way.
posted at 2:06 PM |
3 comments
|
link
3 Comments:
I AGREE WITH YOU 100% OR 1000000000000 IF POSSIBLE, THE RIGHT HAS ALWAYS LIED...
Better call Hillary, it sounds very much like another right wing conspiracy. Here's what bothers me about the piece - it assumes that there is this monolithic force called the right. Based on that notion, everyone in that group thinks the same - has the same motives. That's as silly as thinking that there is this group called the left - all with the same motives, the same views and the same agenda. Neither is true of course. It's shallow thinking. Was the media including the Globe working in some conspiracy of the Left? No, of course not. It was a mistake - just as the text noted. But by the same token, it seems naive to think that the Right conspired against the Globe. We'll all be better off when we remove the labels and think for ourselves.
You write:
It doesn't matter that the paper didn't "publish" the fake pictures, instead accidentally capturing them in a photo of Turner and Kambon. (And before you dismiss my contention that it was an accident, ask yourself if you really believe that any mainstream-newspaper editor would knowingly run graphic photos of oral sex and gang rape. Pause. Okay, you've got your answer, don't you?)
I write:
And you ask yourself, do you really believe that these pics were really missed by all those editors?
Lets follow your logic. The photographer accidentally took pictures of the porn. Im assuming he/she accidentally took more than one, to make sure they would have , er, enough accidental pictures for the article. Then, as many as three, as little as one editor accidentally, missed the porn, and published it it. When the accidental pics that the editor(s) accidentally published, showed up in the early edition, the shit hit the fan, by the time of the second edition later that day, those accidental pics, missed by the editor, so they were accidentally published, had somehow gotten smaller, accidentally Im sure.
Accidentally? Priceless
Regards,
Melissa Weintraub
Bosotn
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
