There are two kinds of news stories I lack confidence in (just two?). There is the anonymously sourced story, and there is the “local people tell us” stories. The first is a staple of political reporting – and the shortcoming is that an anonymous source always has an agenda, and the anonymity hides the agenda. I’m not talking about the “some people say” or “experts say” without providing an actual person which is the way reporters simply inject their own opinions into a story, I’m talking were the reporter is relying on a source for information but just not telling us who that is all the while pretending that we are getting the whole story. We’re not.
The “local people tell us” is a staple of international reporting, but it doesn’t have to be international. The whole Katrina reporting debacle – yes, Virginia, pretty much everything the press reported about New Orleans following Katrina was wrong, and wrong because it was “local people tell us”. The press didn’t make up these stories out of whole cloth, they simply reported rumor as fact (and they thought that if multiple people told them the same rumor, why it must be fact). Think about how bad the press got it during Katrina, when the sources by and large had no agenda but were simply repeating what they had heard in good faith. Then think about all those stories where an intrepid reporter discounts the “official” version of events in a foriegn land because he’s talked to the locals and found out what they know (or in reality, what they think they know). Now the reporter isn’t just running with rumor dressed up in it’s Sunday best, but is often relaying whatever agenda the locals have as well.
This brings me to the story of a possible deliberate killing of civilians by Marines in Iraq. I have no idea what happened, and to my mind both the worst and the best may have occured. But the story is being driven by leaks to the New York Times. Maybe the leaker just wants to get the story out a month or two sooner – or far more likely the leaker has an agenda and wants to shape the story by getting his or her version out there first. And the story of a massecre is also supported by local witnesses — who may be right, but who may be wrong or even lying. And what do we know about eyewitnesses testimony? It’s unreliable, and it can be influenced into error after the fact.
Maybe the lurid storiy of a Marine unit shooting innocents is completely accurate. I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the first time American soldiers have done terrible things. I don’t want to confuse my hopes with reality, but I prefer to wait to more facts are in – what’s really in the report, what is the physical evidence, and even what local eyewitness have to say in detail.
