Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > AP Continues As Terror Equivocator
AP Continues As Terror Equivocator
August 6, 2015
August 5, 2015 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org – Using the shop worn journo legerdemain for which it has become infamous, AP is pushing a story suggesting that Team Obama's minimalist and so far ineffective efforts to thwart the growth of ISIS is killing hundreds of civilians.
"U.S.- led airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria have likely killed at least 459 civilians over the past year, a report by an independent monitoring group said Monday. The report by Airwars, a project aimed at tracking the international airstrikes targeting the extremists, said it believed 57 specific strikes killed civilians and caused 48 suspected "friendly fire" deaths. It said the strikes have killed more than 15,000 Islamic State militants." [source, Vivian Salama and Zeina Karam, Report: US-led strikes against Islamic State in Iraq, Syria have killed at least 459 civilians , AP via U.S. News & World Report]
The website with which AP is casting its lot is www.airwars.org which is run by an anti-American Brit journo whose job it seems is to add some sort of "empirical" evidence to flesh out claims made by – for example, Iran – that America is the Great Satan. Demonstrative of AP's timidity when it comes to Islamism, it simply can't muster the fortitude to call the ISIS butchers terrorists.
The airwars website is full of the type of unverifiable pap that we have come to expect when sourced from largely ME media, suggestions of wanton devastation always highlighted by poignant images of dead kids.
It can't be stressed enough that the information on the website is nigh impossible to confirm because the sources are simply making claims, often in Arabic to further complicate the matter of fact checking.
The real story here is not the self-impressed site proprietor's silly conceptual war against the U.S.; it's AP accepting a "report" [as if the word itself connotes authority] without really having any way of cross-checking or confirming the information being disseminated.
Thus continues the process in which AP has become - over an extended period of time - a joke even within the context of lefty journo. [We must note that in this world of dying print journo and the consequent paring of staffs, the content of entire newspapers now often seems comprised entirely of information gleaned from just a few wire services, AP being predominant among them.]
Regarding the honesty of AP's reportage, the below example dates back to 2002 from a source not generally associated with being rabidly right-wing:
"The Associated Press accused Washington bureau reporter Christopher Newton of journalistic fraud last month and sacked him. The AP alleges that in at least 40 of the many hundred stories Newton wrote for the wire service between Jan. 13, 2000, and Sept. 8, 2002, Newton quoted sources who appear not to exist." Jack Shafer, Fib Newton, Slate Magazine]
There are others, such as a "Pulitzer Prize" winning photog for AP being fired after he was outed for doctoring images.
"A Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer has been fired by the Associated Press news agency after admitting he had doctored one of his photos from the Syrian civil war. The photographer, Narciso Contreras had manipulated a photo of a Syrian rebel by using a common Photoshop technique called 'cloning' in order to remove a fellow reporter's camera out of the picture, before sending it to an AP photo desk." [source, Luke Garratt, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer fired after admitting that he doctored Syrian war rebel picture , UK Daily Mail]
In the case of Salama and Karam's piece, the difficulty exposed is more nuanced. While it may be the case that the U.S. is bombing the hell out of civilians in its pretend war against ISIS, the data is in large part based upon supposition and highlighted by a lack of reasonable curiosity and/or skepticism regarding its truthfulness.
Yet this fuzzy information, which a reasonable editor would normally challenge on numerous grounds, is used to create what is the standard AP meme, that of an out-of-control U.S. wreaking havoc on the world.
Ignored entirely, and this is the case with the overwhelming majority of the legacy media, is that there is no effort whatsoever to contextualize the story.
While America stands accused of accidentally[?] killing approximately 500 civilians throughout the period of the West's soft-ball pushback against ISIS, the terrorists have - with great forethought - has killed at least 50 times that number during just part of 2014 as well as brutalized untold thousands more.
"A United Nations report highlighting the human rights violations of the Islamic State's jihadist campaign in Iraq found that while over 24,000 Iraqi civilians have been injured or killed by ISIS in the first eight months of 2014." [source, Samuel Smith, UN Report on ISIS: 24,000 Killed, Injured by Islamic State; Children Used as Soldiers, Women Sold as Sex Slaves , Christian Post]
What AP and its ilk inordinately fails to mention regarding military operations by Western nations and particularly Israel, is that the civilized world goes to extraordinary lengths, to the point of endangering their own soldiers, to avoid unintended or collateral civilian deaths.
On the other hand ISIS' methodical blood feast is entirely intentional and on constant display, accompanied by a level of depraved barbarity that is beyond comprehension to most.
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