All Blog Posts from Public Eye

You gotta love this – it looks like the AP/conservative bloggers/Jamal Hussein dustup is going to result in some bloggers actually going to Iraq. If you haven't been following all this, here's what's happened so far: Late last month, the AP ran a story asserting that suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia "grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene." Bloggers questioned the veracity of the story and its primary source, police Capt. Jamil Hussein, and CENTCOM released a press release saying that the story could not be corroborated and that Hussein is not a real Baghdad police officer.

Then the AP hit back, releasing a statement from International Editor John Daniszewski arguing that the "attempt to question the existence of the known police officer who spoke to the AP is frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question." The AP then re-reported the story and put out a follow-up piece, with new, albeit anonymous, eyewitness reports of the attack. A spokesman for the Iraqi interior minister maintained that the alleged incident was a "rumor," and the blogs complained that the AP's explanations were unsatisfying. They also called on the AP to produce Hussein.

There's more to all this – a lot more – but that's a good primer. Now the latest: Former CNN executive Eason Jordan has invited Michelle Malkin and Curt from Flopping Aces, the two bloggers most aggressively criticizing the AP, to come with him to Baghdad and try to track down Hussein. Jordan has a new Web site called IraqSlogger, which Editor & Publisher calls "a one-stop-shopping clearinghouse for nonpartisan information," and presumably he has offered to pay for Malkin and Curt to join his team in Iraq to get a little publicity for the new effort.

Read full post…

If you thought the flap over Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell was something, take a look at this growing point of contention on the Web – the Amazon assault. Michelle Malkin has all the details about the campaign, apparently led by left-leaning blogs, to use reader reviews on Amazon.com to drive down the site’s rankings of conservative tomes.



Initially, the target was a book by Kate O’Beirne, titled “Women Who Make the World Worse.” Now, a new book about President Bush by conservative commentator Fred Barnes is under the gun. It’s not yet caused Amazon to shut down its reviews, but it’s getting some notice. Malkin:

“Bottom line: The Amazon.com review section has become a joke and a cesspool, and if the company cares about its credibility with a large segment of its book-buying audience, it better fix the problem.”

Update: Commenters point out Amazon attacks nothing new.

Read full post…

It seems bloggers weren’t so happy with my observation that they had been “strangely silent” about documents released regarding Joel Hinrichs’ suicide. Hinrichs, you may remember, was the young man who blew himself up not far from a packed University of Oklahoma football game on October 2nd and set off a rash of terrorism theories in the blogosphere. Given all the attention paid to the story at that time, I did think it odd that nobody seemed eager to follow up on some of the information that had been publicly released.

Well, now they have, at least some of them. Michelle Malkin, who spearheaded the original collection of theories and discussion, has generously stepped up to the plate, despite the inconvenience. Here’s how she put her efforts to comb through some 350 pages of unsealed court documents:

“It would have been nice if an MSM outlet with boundless time, resources, and manpower -- say, CBS News -- had made the unsealed documents available to the public. But they didn't. So I spent several hours scanning and uploading as many of the records as I could.”

Michelle has made 94 pages available on her website as a public service. She does a tremendous amount of work for one person, but neither she nor anyone else should be under the illusion that CBS News has some unlimited amount of “time, resources and manpower” available.

Michelle then takes me to task for daring to suggest bloggers update their stories:

“Ververs does not say whether he or anyone else at his hallowed news network actually obtained or read the court records. If he hasn't done so, isn't his uninformed push for bloggers to ‘correct’ themselves, well, strange?”

I’ll give Michelle this, the word “correct” was not the best choice for the sentiment I wanted to convey. My point was, quite simply, that after all the provocative and downright scary theories of a terrorist plot to blow up a football stadium – some that included reported incidents at other universities, it would be appropriate to update those theories when new information became available.

Read full post…