PressEthic

I found this piece of information on littlegreenfootballs about Jimmy Massey ( a former Marine), and his inaccurate stories about atrocities committed by US Marines in Iraq, including random killing of innocent civilians. These stories were printed in a number of newspapers and magazines.

Although I disagree with most of the opinions expressed on this blog, I did feel that this particular story warranted some attention. A quick Google News and Lexis Nexis search turned up only a handful newspapers that had covered this story, and none of them were any of the major dailies.

The St Louis Post-Dispatch sought to take apart a number of claims made by Jimmy Massey, and was critical of the fact that the press had allowed itself to be lead on by him.

It is only natural to then question that if the mainstream media did use this source to run stories about war crimes, why are they ignoring these developments?

Most of the papers carrying this story simply used the St Louis Post-Dispatch piece about Jimmy Massey, and his false claims of war atrocities. The lack of original stories, and the fact that most of the information was coming from just one paper made me a little skeptical about the authenticity of this news

Given these circumstances the silence from mainstream papers on this topic is most disconcerting. They need to either refute this story, or accept the fact that he turned out to be a bad source in order to resolve this issue.