Greg Mitchell, writing in Editor & Publisher, doesn’t think you, Humble Reader, deserve the truth. What else can it be given the gross distortions and out right lies, as Allahpundit so ably demonstrates, Mitchell makes in his defense of the Main Stream Media?
The “abstract” leading into Mitchell’s tripe reads:
While some criticism is warranted, the current controversy over manipulated or staged pictures from Lebanon has been fueled by speculative, unfounded, or politically-driven charges that have tainted all of the brave photographers who cover conflict in the Middle East.
You mean like the ruse that Hizzbullah played in duplicating the same type of Ambulance disaster as happened ten years ago? Only this time the very industry that Mitchell defends spread the gross lies far, wide and quickly; perhaps changing the war. Zombie has an amazing fisking of the entire event.
On the night of July 23, 2006, an Israeli aircraft intentionally fired missiles at and struck two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances performing rescue operations, causing huge explosions that injured everyone inside the vehicles. Or so says the global media, including Time magazine, the BBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and thousands of other outlets around the world. If true, the incident would have been an egregious and indefensible violation of the Geneva Convention, and would constitute a war crime committed by the state of Israel.But there’s one problem: It never happened.
Unlike the mere handful of bad apples that Mitchell would have you believe exist, the Main Stream Media…whether complicit or through single minded determination to show the latest horror…spread a lie at, literally, the speed of light.
Mitchell says:
only to be smeared, as a group, by rightwing bloggers aiming, as always, to discredit the media as a whole.
But, in fact, virtually the entire media did perform a disservice. They lied to us. Whether by omission or commission it matters not. The press industry thrives on getting the story out quickly. When personal advocacy or failure to check facts happens a fraudulent  story, like a speeding bullet, is already on it’s way.
In the effort to show how horrible the blogosphere is Mitchell then goes on to lie misrepresent various examples of not only the fauxtography but of the words of photojournalist Bryon Denton. Allahpundit explains:
Nor does he mention that later in the same thread Denton repeated the allegation and asserted that he’d heard from friends in Lebanon that it wasn’t an isolated incident. To read Mitchell, you would think that Denton had “apologized†and retracted his accusation. Nothing of the sort. Here’s what Denton actually said:
again, i am terribly sorry for rattling the saber so hard….re-reading my words I too should have been a bit more responsible.
Now why would Mitchell lie so blatantly about something so easily disproved? Why whip up a story that blasts the people who are taking the MSM to task? It could be that he, a Certified Press Gatekeeper and no stranger to advocacy himself, simply doesn’t want the people to know the whole story; rather, it is better for Mitchell and people like them to serve up what they think you should know.
As Gaius says in this comment in his post on the issue:
Yeah, it’s so unfair of the public to demand actual truth instead of media approved truthiness.