Bloggers Attack the Largest News Agency in the World

For the past six weeks irate, right-wing bloggers have been accusing the Associated Press of faking news. Based on information the US government provided, the bloggers alleged AP's agenda was to paint a bleak picture of sectarian violence in Iraq. That came to an end recently when the US military admitted it had lied about a news source.

It all began in November, after AP ran a story about six Sunnis being attacked and burned to death by Shiites at a mosque. The AP story included a line about a source. The U.S. military, and the Iraq government, said the source never existed. The governments said that AP’s source on the story was made-up. They claimed the story was fabricated.

Conservative bloggers used the official story, that the witness never existed, to attack AP. Bloggers got busy criticizing the media. The blogsphere buzzed with posts about the left-wing bias of news reporting. They used the story to illustrate Western media’s alleged bias towards presenting Iraq in the worst possible light.

Then this week the US reversed its earlier denial and announced that the source was actually legitimate and that the story about six Sunnis being attacked and burned to death by Shiites at a mosque was true.

The rally by right-wing bloggers brings up questions. Who was behind the bloggers’ rally to attack AP? Why did the story, which received so much Internet traffic, get almost no coverage in mainstream media? Why did the US and Iraq governments deny the existence of the source? In the end, the governments’ denials, and the campaign against a credible news organization by right-wing online activists, shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, the war was initiated by fooling US citizens, and the media, into a battle using a campaign of misinformation and half truths, by a leader who still doesn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. In the words of a confused G.W. Bush “Fool me once…fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."