It is a very interresting trip to follow the links I followed to get to this story. First thanks to Nancy Weinberg for putting this on her Facebook Wall. I followed the link she gave to Glenn Greenwald’s First Look which had the story NBC’s Conduct in Engel Kidnapping Story is More Troubling than the Brian Williams Scandal.
That there was ample reason to doubt Engel’s belief about the identity of his captors is proven by how many people publicly called it into doubt. That NBC’s broadcasts reflected none of this doubt, and instead allowed a one-sided tale that we now know to be false to go unquestioned by the entire network is bad enough. That these executives seemed to have had ample reason to doubt the story themselves makes it far worse than just merely “bad”: it is the type of systematic journalistic deceit and propaganda that we have seen over and over, almost always on the side and in service of the U.S. government’s agenda of endless war.
The First Look story says that The New York Times broke this story. The link to The New York Times that I followed was NBC News Alters Account of Correspondent’s Kidnapping in Syria.
NBC’s own assessment during the kidnapping had focused on Mr. Qassab and Mr. Ajouj, according to a half-dozen people involved in the recovery effort. NBC had received GPS data from the team’s emergency beacon that showed it had been held early in the abduction at a chicken farm widely known by local residents and other rebels to be controlled by the Sunni criminal group.
As long as I had come this far, I decided to go to NBC itself for the Engel post New Details on 2012 Kidnapping of NBC News Team in Syria. This article was anti-climactic by comparison.
I don’t know what is most ironic.
- NBC news executives acting more deceitfully than Brian Williams whom they have suspended for what he did.
- The New York Times taking umbrage that a “respected” news medium would lie about a story to support the US government’s cause of the moment.
- Richard Engel downplaying the role his bosses played in this farce.
I refer to a certain network as Faux Noise. What should I start calling NBC? Or The New York Times for that matter. I already say that The New York Times “prints all the news it sees fit to print”.
It just proves that one should always be skeptical of what one reads, even (or especially) about what one reads on this blog. I don’t even believe myself anymore.