The Boston Globe today ran explicit photographs allegedly showing sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers on its front page today. The photographs are, in fact, fake and are taken from various pornographic Internet sites.
The amusing thing is that World Net Daily exposed the photographs as fake more than a week ago — when World Net Daily produces more credible reporting than one of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper, some heads should roll at the Globe.
And this after Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll was bitching about the rise of “pseudo-journalists” — by which he meant Fox News. Carroll cited studies showing that people who are frequent watchers of Fox are more likely than others to hold false views about weapons of mass destruction, etc. in Iraq.
But Carroll conveniently forgot to mention that his paper has been responsible for a number of bald-faced lies. It was the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Scheer, for example, who single handedly invented the myth that the United States gave foreign aid to the Taliban in early 2001 in exchange for the Taliban’s agreement to crack down on drug production there. It was a complete and utter falsehood, but it is still widely believed in left wing circle thanks to the L.A. Times’ incompetence.
Maybe if Carroll and other spent as much time worrying about getting things right in their own papers instead of obsessing over Fox News, they might be able to restore some of the trust that they’ve lost from readers who at least appreciate that Fox News’ bias is transparent and easy to spot as opposed to that of the Times or the Washington Post or the Boston Globe who cloak their biases behind the mantra that what they’re doing is “real journalism.”