If you think CNN has any credibility left as a news organization, you may want to read some of the recent posts at Josh Marshall's blog Talking Points Memo.
This concerns the story that broke over the last few days of the explosives looted from the al Qaqaa munitions installation in Iraq. Apprently NBC briefly ran a story that suggested that when U.S. troops first arrived at al Qaqaa during the war last spring, they found that the explosives were already gone. NBC soon discovered, however, that this story was not true. Nonetheless, CNN has been pushing this story harder than NBC ever did. Not coincidentally, I'm sure, CNN's version is just what the Bush administration wants everyone to believe, as it would excuse them of a monumental f***-up.
Here is how Josh Marshall's latest post sums up what CNN has been doing:
As we noted last night, on the Nightly News, NBC ran a segment on one of their news crews' visit to al Qaqaa on April 10th, 2003, as embeds with the 101st Airborne. According to that NBC initial report, these were the first US troops on the scene and the explosives were already gone.
NBC didn't run very hard with the story, though, as evidenced by the fact that it didn't even show up on the MSNBC website. But after Drudge started hammering it and it got ginned around the Republican media echo chamber, CNN picked it up and started running with it harder than NBC ever did.
They even made it the headline story on their website for much of last night.
They did this apparently without doing a google or Nexis search to see that the NBC crew embedded with the 101st Airborne wasn't with the first US troops to get there. That actually happened a week earlier, on April 4th 2002, as we noted in this post last night.
In a series of reports today from a member of the news crew in question and from follow-up reporting from Jim Miklaszewski, it became clear that the troops in question made no attempt to inspect the facility for the explosives in question.
Yet CNN is apparently still pushing it.
No matter how easy you guys give it up, they're still not going to love you like FOX.
Sad.
Late Update: As of 5:29 PM on the east coast CNN has a front page story that still includes the now-defunct NBC story.
Looking at CNN's site, I see they now have the corrected version of the story (via AP). Nonetheless, with all the alternatives out there, please do not rely on CNN for your news until they prove that they are once again reliable.
Comments