PressEthic

The following series of quotes are taken from an online Fox News article, which credits the AP with the story, and is published Monday 31st October, 2005.

The earlier introduction to this particular event in question, one of a number listed in a longer article focusing on a recent car-bomb in Basrah, is as follows:

Earlier Monday, U.S. jets struck insurgent targets near the Syrian border and at least six people were killed

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The US military statements very rarely give figures for civilian casualties, though it is believed that somewhere in the Pentagon a count is being kept:

Before dawn Monday, Marines backed by jets attacked insurgent positions near the Syrian border, destroying two safe houses believed use by Al Qaeda figures, a U.S. statement said. The statement made no mention of casualties, but Associated Press Television News video from the scene showed residents wailing over the bodies of about six people, including at least three children

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The second attempt at getting a figure seems to indicate that an AP reporter or stringer has been on the scene asking questions:

At the local hospital, Dr. Ahmed al-Ani claimed 40 Iraqis, including 12 children, were killed in the attack. But the claim could not be independently verified

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By whom is this AP writer or stringer expecting the doctor's figure to be verifed? Who has reported that the doctor said this? Neither are clear, and this adds to the confusion for the reader.

A, "third party" news source, the "Associated Press," in what seems to be a fit of self-reference, is then quoted to give yet another perspective:

APTN footage from the scene showed Iraqi men digging through the rubble of several destroyed concrete buildings with a pitchfork or their hands. In the building of a nearby home, women cried over the bodies of about half a dozen blanket-covered bodies lined up on a floor. Some of the blankets were opened for the camera showing a man and three children

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Try to ignore the amateur repetition of the word, "bodies" in the passage above, it can be blamed on the copy editors for their online edition. I am still not particularly clear whether this story was written entirely by the AP and then run by Fox as a whole, or whether it is a Fox-written composite of various AP sources. Referring to APTN seems to imply the latter, but this not obvious.

An unnamed source is the final estimation of the Iraqi dead given in this piece, concerning this one attack near the Syrian border:

"At least 20 innocent people were killed by the U.S. warplanes. Why are the Americans killing families? Where are the insurgents?" one middle-aged man told APTN. "We don't see democracy. We just see destruction." He didn't give his name

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So to recap, as part of a longer article, one particular event is initially introduced as having led to the death of, "at least six people." Thus the footage from APTN is the only independent verification of the Iraqi death toll, since they show, "ABOUT half a dozen blanket-covered bodies."

The US military are no help on getting hold of the figures - presumably because Iraqi civilian deaths are hardly going to advance their cause - and so Fox/AP then reports the claims of a local doctor, who only, "claimed" (note the innate scepticism of this form for indirect speech) that 40 people had been killed. So we go from a certain 6 to an unlikely 40 in a paragraph, and are then back to an unattributable 20 from an unidentified source, who is quoted directly, and was thus presumably questioned by an AP reporter on the ground.

Perhaps more disturbing than these inconsistencies, (which I grant in such an environment as western Iraq are very difficult to iron out) is the language used in the initial introduction to this episode. The fact that, "U.S. jets struck insurgent targets," implies to me that insurgents were killed during the attacks, though this is not at all implied in the rest of the piece. This seems to be an example of a reputable news source resorting to the use of US military rhetoric in its writing, as a substitute for hard-to-come-by but accurate reporting.

This has become a habit for the media in Iraq, exacerbated by very difficult conditions, and a Department of Defense spin machine which churns out figures and photos for the next morning's headlines and, more typically these days, sidebars. The insurgent "strikes" are almost given as a mitigation for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq, a rather morbid tit-for-tat, but upon closer examination, if the article is read in its entirety, the claims of a local man imply that no single insurgent was killed, only ordinary residents.

The other difficulty, which is also to some extent unavoidable given the constraints on individual networks, is the blurred line between network (Fox) and wire service (AP) reporting. When a byline is given to the AP, does that definitively guarantee that every word of an AP reporter's article is posted verbatim by the customer, in this case Fox, or do they have some editorial license to mix and match composite pieces such as may be the case here? Without the distinction being made explicit, certain aspects of a given article can remain obscure to the reader.