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fortdixlover
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 12 May 2004
Posts: 1476
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 Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2005 12:01 am Post subject: Parallels between Kerry & Kerry Jr (a.k.a. Massey) |
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From Powerline blog:
Oops, Never Mind
That's the reaction of some newspapers to the revelation that ex-Marine Jimmy Massey's claims to have witnessed numerous atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq were false. Michelle Malkin has a roundup. Still, most news outlets who printed Massey's sensational allegations, most notably the Associated Press, have done nothing to let their readers know that those claims have turned out to be fraudulent.
The New York Post has a blistering editorial, which among other things, points out the similarity between Massey's allegations and John Kerry's false claims about American atrocities in Vietnam. I suppose we should be grateful for small favors, though: there is no indication that Jimmy Massey is likely to run for President.
Posted by John at 02:19 PM
-- FDL
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"Millions For Defense, Not One Cent For Tribute" - Thomas Jefferson on paying ransom to Muslim corsairs (pirates). |
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Me#1You#10
Site Admin
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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| Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2005 12:59 am Post subject: |
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In case the NY Post editorial disappears into the archives...
| Quote: | ANTI-WAR LIARS & THOSE WHO LOVE 'EM
NY Post
November 10, 2005 -- It's easy to see why Jimmy Massey be came an instant darling of the liberal news media: With his personal testimony that he and his fellow Marines, acting under direct orders, committed war crimes, he was the Iraq war's iteration of Jane Fonda and John Kerry.
And equally truthful.
Scores of media outlets rushed his claims into print, under such headlines as: "I killed innocent people for our government." He was a featured guest on National Public Radio, and college officials fell all over themselves in the stampede to invite him as a guest speaker.
Pretty soon, he'd published a book, "Kill, Kill, Kill," which was released in surprise, surprise France. And he became a star attraction on Cindy Sheehan's national self-pity parade.
Sure, the Pentagon insisted his allegations had been probed and discredited. But no one paid any attention to that.
Not until last weekend, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that its own investigation showed conclusively that Massey, plain and simple, is a liar.
As the paper's Ron Harris reported: "Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated according to his fellow Marines, Massey's own admissions and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's unit."
Even though his story "changed repeatedly" on each retelling, no one else in the mainstream media had shown any interest in looking any deeper into Massey's claim that his battalion consisted of "psychopathic killers" who on one "unforgettable" occasion filled a tractor-trailer with the bodies of scores of Iraqi civilians.
Indeed, even his own supposed crime shooting a 6-year-old child in the head turns out to be a fantasy. Confronted by Harris, he claimed "that's what my unit did" but couldn't provide details. Nor could he name even a single Marine to corroborate any of his stories.
Massey, significantly, was discharged after suffering a nervous breakdown. In other words, he was what's known as a Section Eight that is, crazy.
Both Harris and Michelle Malkin, whose column appears on the preceding page, asked several of the media outlets that had hyped Massey's claim for a reaction.
(Typical was Rex Smith, editor of the Albany Times-Union, who said "it would have been much better if we had the other side." No kidding.)
These supposed news outlets published Massey's claims without even trying to verify them or, in some cases, without even getting a pro forma response from the Pentagon.
During Vietnam, the news media promoted a similar showcase of the anti-war Left called "Winter Soldier," which also featured first-person allegations of U.S. war crimes. Eventually, it came out that the claims were a total fraud.
Now, the same crowd is at it again. And, once again, their media allies are playing along.
How much more proof is needed that the mainstream media are nothing less than shrill propaganda outlets for the Bush-bashing anti-war crowd, willing almost eager to undermine the efforts of America's fighting men and women?
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Me#1You#10
Site Admin
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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| Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2005 1:35 am Post subject: |
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Quite a remarkable story and encouraging that Massey's debunking emanated from an "MSM" source, Ron Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch...perhaps that's cause for some hope of redemption in at least some elements of the MSM...
Also quite remarkable, the Sacramento Bee's retraction of their story on Massey (via Michelle Malkin as well)...kudos to the "Bee"...
| Quote: | David Holwerk: How we came to publish a story we shouldn't have
By David Holwerk -- Bee Editorial Pages Editor
Published 2:15 am PST Sunday, November 13, 2005
Story appeared in Forum section, Page E1
If you've never heard of a former Marine staff sergeant named Jimmy Massey nor of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter named Ron Harris, you probably don't know that The Bee is part of a media controversy that unfolded last week.
Last Sunday, the Post-Dispatch published a story in which reporter Harris raised serious questions about Massey's credibility. And, because The Bee ran an article in Forum in May 2004 in which Massey said that he and other Marines committed atrocities in Iraq, that raises serious questions about The Bee's performance.
Harris quoted me in his Post-Dispatch story as saying, "I feel fairly confident that we did not subject this to the rigorous scrutiny that we should have or to which we would subject it today."
That's accurate. We should have done more to check the truth of Massey's charges before deciding whether to publish them. We didn't, and the responsibility for that is mine.
It was an error in judgment, and The Bee's readers are entitled to an explanation of how I made that error.
The chain of events began in April 2004, when Paul Rockwell submitted an article to The Bee. Rockwell is a librarian and freelance writer who lives in Oakland. His work had appeared in Forum twice before - once in July 1999 and again in June 2001. He sent the article on Massey to Bill Moore, who was then editor of the Forum section.
The article was a lengthy question-and-answer interview with Jimmy Massey, a Marine staff sergeant from North Carolina. In it Massey claimed to have witnessed and participated in the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq.
That's the kind of story that gets an editor's attention. It's also the kind of story no editor just slaps in the paper.
I asked Moore a number of questions and asked him to take steps to check Massey's credibility. Moore contacted Massey to verify that Rockwell had quoted him accurately and to obtain a copy of Massey's discharge papers. Moore also checked with the Pentagon to verify that Massey had been where he claimed to be when he claimed to be there.
The answers to those questions jibed with Massey's story. He was in Iraq at the places and times he said he was. His record with the Marines was what he claimed it had been. He was a decorated combat veteran. He had been honorably discharged.
So far, so good. The problem is that we didn't go far enough. Before we published the story, we should have called the Marine Corps for response. We also could have attempted to speak to other members of Massey's Marine unit and to check whether any reporters were embedded with Massey's company. But we didn't.
Nonetheless, after some internal discussion, I decided that Massey was a credible source with a riveting story to tell and that we would publish the story, which we did on May 16, 2004. The story sparked a number of letters, some questioning the credibility of Massey's story. We published five letters about the story - two of them critical - and that was that, until about three weeks ago.
That's when reporter Harris called. He told me he was working on a story about Massey and identified himself as having been embedded with Massey's unit in Iraq. He told me that neither he nor other embedded journalists had seen any evidence of the atrocities Massey alleged and that other members of Massey's unit had told him the incidents never occurred. He also told me the Marine Corps had investigated Massey's allegations and had concluded they were baseless.
He said a number of news organizations had published some version of Massey's accounts. (Among the ones he named are the Associated Press, USA Today and the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, along with smaller newspapers around the country.) And he asked how The Bee had decided to publish the interview with Massey with no other sources, no response from the Marine Corps and no independent corroboration.
After I looked up the story, I told him the truth: It was clear in retrospect that we hadn't done due diligence with the Jimmy Massey interview.
Since then, things have been busy on the Jimmy Massey/Ron Harris front. Last Sunday, Harris' story appeared in the Post-Dispatch and Harris appeared on CNN to talk about his story. A number of conservative commentators picked up the story and began taking to task newspapers that had published versions of Massey's story.
Massey has responded with an article posted on the Web and sent to the Post-Dispatch. In it, Massey sticks by his accounts of atrocities in Iraq. He accuses the reporter of retaliating against him for calling attention to what he says was Harris' inaccurate reporting while embedded in Iraq. Anti-war Web sites have joined the fray, which shows signs of becoming a skirmish - if not a full-fledged battle - waged across the domestic schism over the war in Iraq.
I'd like to be able to tell you who's telling the truth in all this, but I can't. Is it Jimmy Massey, a decorated Marine veteran with an honorable discharge? Or is it Ron Harris, an experienced reporter who lived alongside Marines in Iraq?
What I can do is to direct you to Web sites where the various pieces of this controversy appear. A list of pertinent Web addresses appears with this column.
And I can say this much: I should have insisted that we do more to check out Massey's account before it ran in The Bee. Without such checking, we should not have published the story.
Our editing and fact-checking processes are better than they were 17 months ago, and I'm confident we wouldn't make the same error in judgment now. But I made one in May 2004, and there's no disputing the truth of that.
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kate
Admin
Joined: 14 May 2004
Posts: 1891
Location: Upstate, New York
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| Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2005 5:16 am Post subject: |
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Ron Harriss articles are posted on a thread here
The one exposing Massey, and one slamming the MSM
BZ's to Mr Harris
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Deuce
Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 19 Mar 2005
Posts: 589
Location: FL
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| Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2005 12:07 am Post subject: |
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yep,
The left leaning liberal liars club is loved by our "Media", cause that way they can print someone else's lies for a change. Mebbe they know we get tired of reading "Media" lies over and over! 
Deuce |
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