It’s not surprising that harried Associated Press reporters, tasked with delivering news bulletins as often as news stories, often fall back on reporting as stenography.
But yesterday the wire service may have reached new heights — or depths — of reporting deadpan whatever anyone in a position of authority says, even if it makes no sense whatsoever.
Filing from Baghdad, reporter Robert Reid wrote:
Three massive vehicle bombs exploded Monday near the Palestine Hotel, home to many Western journalists, killing at least 20 people. Dramatic TV pictures showed one of the bombers driving a cement truck through the concrete blast walls that guard the hotel, then blowing up his vehicle.
Iraq’s national security adviser, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, said the attack — which appeared well-planned — was a “very clear” effort to take over the hotel and seize journalists as hostages. …
All three [vehicle bombs] were believed to be suicide attacks.
Given that it’s very hard to kidnap anyone after you have just killed yourself, we set out to find a perhaps more logical explanation for the bombers’ actions. Fortunately, we discovered it in a dispatch by New York Times reporter Kirk Semple.
Like AP, Semple quotes the hapless al-Rubaie hypothesizing that the true goal of the suicide bombers was to kidnap foreigners. Unlike AP, Semple takes it a few steps further, quoting other government officials who speculate that the motive of the attackers “may have been simply to kill as many people as possible in a high-profile manner, particularly by attacking a headquarters for the foreign news media.” Semple gives the last word to Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrhim al-Jaafari:
“Three car bombs are designed to maximize casualties, not to take hostages. That’s not their style. This is just carnage.”
We don’t mean to minimize the difficulties of reporting from the site of an act of terror. But even at the scene of a horrific catastrophe, when a government official begins babbling nonsense, a reporter has an obligation to either call it that, or to go on to a second source.
AP did neither.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.