“Looting”
Howard Kurtz on the Baghdad museum “looting”:
All those heart-rending stories about zillions of precious artifacts being looted in Iraq, all that dramatic footage of valuables being carried off from the ransacked museum – and the story goes pffttt!We’re used to journalists being misled in the famous fog of war, but this is ridiculous.
Everyone in journalism makes mistakes, especially routine mistakes – the misspelled name, the mangled title, the wrong date. In this case, though, the press told us that, in a crushing loss for western civilization, 170,000 artifacts were stolen.
The actual number: 33.
Yes, some of the booty was later returned, but 169,967 items? Maybe Don Rumsfeld was right that TV kept showing the same vase being carried away over and over.
Most of the collection, it seems, was hidden in a secret vault.
…
“Apparently, it was not that bad.”
Apparently.
But what about everyone else? We’re sure various news outlets have mentioned it, but certainly not with enough frequency to correct the impression left by the earlier hyped reports. This hasn’t exactly been a staple of cable TV. The news business has just sort of moved on without even murmuring an apology.
This is just more proof that the “mainstream” media hates America and wants our country to fail in its endeavors. After their defeatist progapanda about the war proved to be utterly wrong, they hung their hats on the one bad story they could find. When it turned out to be false, the media refused to issue corrections, let alone apologize. And we’re supposed to trust these purveyors of fiction, instead of the Bush administration?
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