The 0wning of the N00z M3dia

Well, it's happened again. The liberal media, in their haste to find fault and show all possible negative consequences of the policies of President Bush, has been taken by a blatant lie, an outright fraud. Most of you have by now seen the story of the missing "hostage" in Iraq. And by now, most of you have heard the speculation that this picture, much like the "declassified memos" that ripped Bush's National Guard service record, is a total fake. There are many excellent blogs that have run with this story, like here and here. My friend Chong made the following comments regarding the whole thing, and they're too priceless to not put down somewhere (Chong, unlike the remaining 99.9% of the planet, doesn't have his own blog yet.):

I asked him what he thought good ol' Honest Dan Rather would say about it:

He'll say the picture is fake, but it captures some essential truths. Fake but accurate.

Chong at his finest...he can be quite witty when he wants to be. In any case, we laughed and laughed about this. I've even considered putting together my own picture of a Ken doll, with a Barbie hairdryer pointed at his head by someone out of frame, with a caption of something like this: "Ken has been taken hostage by a group calling themselves "The al-Barbie Martyrs Brigade". They declared that they will decapitate Ken within 72 hours if he does not agree to finally marry Barbie and provide her with the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed."

OK, OK, enough jokes at the media's expense. Let's move on to some serious questions raised by this little incident:

1. Is this legitimate? I mean that as, did some insurgent group REALLY take this picture, doctored though it may be? I am inclined to say no; I doubt even insurgents believe Americans are that stupid. Osama is a military man. He knows that underestimating your enemy can be deadly. He already made that error on September 11, 2001, when he believed that the attack on the WTC Towers would crush the American will to fight and force the immediate removal of all soldiers from all Arab/Muslim countries.

2. If it's a hoax, who the heck did it? And how on Earth did they get it posted to a website that has put forward many legitimate hostage photos and videos? It sounds to me like there's either a huge conspiracy to make the American media look bad, or the Arabic media is as hungry to post negative, anti-American stories as the American liberal media is. Which leads to the final, most disturbing question...

3. HOW ON EARTH DID THE AP FALL FOR THIS???? Someone at the AP had to have found this. Did they not look at the picture closely? Was the eyesight of all of those who reviewed the story before it went to print that poor? Could they not see the obvious weirdness, the blatant wrongness of everything in the photo? Forget ALL the strange inconsistencies with the photo. The head of the "soldier" is completely disproportionate with the rest of his body. No militants are in the picture, unusual for the militant groups' photos and videos we've seen. Militants don't use M-16s (the weapon pointed at the "soldier's" head is a US M-16), preferring the widely-available Russian AK47 clones so prevalent in the area. The soldier's face is amazingly blank and lacks any of the marks or injuries we'd expect to see and have seen in other such instances. The uniform he's wearing is not consistent with the common US battle dress we've seen so many times before, and it's incredibly clean and in good shape for what you'd expect to see. These people at the AP are paid to notice these things, to weed them out, and to verify this stuff before they tell the world. Yet, all of their journalistic safeguards failed them once again, and they've been, as we say in the infosec world, "0wned".

Are the mainstream American news outlets THAT anxious to put out a story first, that they won't scrutinize it like they used to? Are they THAT eager to put up any kind of criticism of George W. Bush in the wake of the successful and emotional Iraqi elections on Sunday? Or are they really as stupid as the people who made the photo believe them to be? The media already had Strike One in the count in the past 6 months, with the ridiculous memo issue at CBS. This is Strike Two. I say, one more strike, and they're out. We can either continue to let them throw ridiculous stories at us based on their own biases, or we can force them to clean up their act and start reporting real news again.

Just my two cents on an already over-covered story, but I couldn't resist. Thanks for reading along.