Journalists knowingly lie? You betcha

The epidemic of lying in the media is so fascinating, I thought it would make for another column (or 40).

When someone like Bill Clinton claims that he would get in a ditch with a rifle and fight and die for Israel if necessary (as he claimed a few years ago), we all know the Boy from Hope is funnin' us. Nobody takes that seriously; we know it isn't true. But it gets reported because a former president said it. The reporter was merely quoting a public figure.

But it's much harder to discern a falsehood when it's dropped into a news story (or a book, like any written by Jimmy Carter in the last 30 years, particularly "Palestine or Apartheid?").

A recent piece describing the carnage in Nigeria, when Muslim jihadists butchered 500 Christian men, women and children, is a case in point. The lie came not in the reporter's blatant bias, but in the selection of a quote.

In the northern city of Jos last week, members of the ("mainly") Muslim Fulani ethnic group took axes and machetes to defenseless villagers and, for good measure, burned a good number of the straw-and-mud huts in their way.

Mind you, this story is very straightforward; it would be similar to a story about a Civil War battle, in the sense that certain undeniable facts are obvious: two opposing armies met at Gettysburg during three days in early July and the Union Army was able to fend off the Confederates' deepest penetration yet into enemy territory.

For the Jos massacre story, same deal, except now we are living in an era of disinformation and misinformation.

Oh, the reporter did record the obvious, that after the attackers broke into homes shouting "Allahu akbar," the singsong of jihadists, a statement was issued by the Plateau State Christian Elders Consulatative Forum: "The attack is yet another jihad and provocation."

So far, all this falls into the "two opposing armies met at Gettysburg" realm.

But unfortunately, the reporter felt the need to include a quote from the archbishop of Abuja. The "good" bishop claimed that the violence was "rooted not in religion, but in social, economic and tribal differences."

Now we have a blatant lie masquerading as a credible statement from a religious official. No doubt said archbishop doesn't want to sleep in a suit of armor, so he thinks pacifying the jihadists is the way to go.

The quote is very unfortunate, because it takes a story from the realm of straightforward reporting to fuzziness. Amazingly, many who read it will assume the archbishop might be right, that perhaps one group of villagers was just mad because the neighboring villagers grew better vegetables.

Please, this kind of journalism makes the struggle against jihadists easier to lose, because they love nothing better than to blur the lines with propaganda, something jihadists like Yasser Arafat learned from their Marxist buddies.

Continuing with the "Middle East" tone of today's column, let me give you another nugget from more than a decade ago. This is another gem from the syndicated columnist I mentioned last week, the one who accused Israel of burrowing under the Temple Mount.

Around the same time, she wrote a piece about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his American counterpart, the ditch-hugging, Alvin York–wannabe Bill Clinton. The writer compared them in various ways — some similarities and some differences — before making the following mind-boggling statement: In neither does one find experience in their respective militaries.

Cue laugh track.

I think most of us are aware that Bill Clinton spent the Vietnam War years parked with his El Camino down at the duck pond. But Bibi Netanyahu spent the same years in savage combat against jihadists. A member of the elite counterterrorism unit, Sayaret Matkal (as were his brothers, Jonathan and Iddo), Netanyahu also distinguished himself during fighting in the Yom Kippur War.

See, while Clinton was tomcatting and attending Marxist film festivals, Netanyahu, upon hearing of the outbreak of fighting on October 6, 1973, immediately left his studies at MIT and got on a plane. Three weeks later, he had been part of the almost-biblical effort to turn the tide against Syria and Egypt.

I called the columnist and pointed all this out.

I said, "You know, after covering the Middle East for 35 years, that military service is mandatory for Israelis, right?"

She hemmed and hawed, and claimed that while at a cocktail party for the Israeli ambassador, she heard that Netanyahu had not served. I asked if I could quote her.

"I'd rather you didn't," she said.

You see, we both knew that I knew that she was lying. She had wanted to portray Netanyahu, at the time a wildly hated prime minister internationally, as an empty-suit pretty boy who just wouldn't get with the program and give a Palestinian state to the serial-killer Arafat.

This is one of the problems in publishing; people willingly lie. They do it every day. The lies distort real events and cause many people to make wrong decisions. For example, enough columns like the one I cited above and all of a sudden, millions are demanding that compromise with killers like Arafat is a good thing. It is a bedrock truth in our world today that the Palestinians have found favor with the international community in peddling their narrative. The rest of us have been damaged because of it.

I'll conclude with a story that is seemingly harmless, but I argue that it is not. Again, it portrays a conservative politician in a negative light.

Yahoo News! reported recently on the Sarah Palin stand-up appearance on whatever show Jay Leno is hosting now. One can YouTube the performance, and it appears to be a pretty funny routine by a media-savvy politician, Palin.

The reporter for Yahoo, however, no doubt is a left-leaning Democrat. Note the following statement, after some description of Palin's performance:

"Still, there are some who suspect that Jay Leno's staff 'added both applause and laughter in postproduction' to make the appearance look like more of a success."

You're ahead of me, I hope. You get it, don't you? The phrase "some who suspect" is probably as old in journalism as the first Sumerian cuneiform broadsheets. The phrase really means, "I'm making this part up to justify my criticism of this individual."

"Some who suspect" is a magic bullet, because those "anonymous" sources can't be tracked down to see in fact if anyone did this.

Palin goes from a fairly funny public figure to just another phony right-winger.

It's an effective tactic used by leftists in the media.

And it's still wrong.

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