My neologism “reuter’d” has yet to catch on. reuter’d: To be fooled by propaganda masquerading as news. Derived from punk’d and fake Reuters news photographs from the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict. Professor Marc Lynch was reuter’d last summer. (S…

Zombie’s response to HRW is here: http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/hrw/

Here is a blog you might like Ethan: http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/

Elder makes some excellent points on the ambulance story that you might find interesting.

Great blog and very interesting discussion.

My neologism for this, reuter’d, has yet to catch on.

Regarding the ambulance attack incident specifically, however, I believe the main line of criticism is that Israel is used to fighting groups that have been demonstrated to use clearly marked ambulances and UN vehicles to move fighters and weapons (Fatah, Hamas). I’m not sure if anyone has definitively demonstrated that Hizbullah does this too; however, I am aware of incidents in which Israel has confirmed that it attacked ambulances or UN-marked civilian vehicles, with that explanation. So it seems to me that another issue here is, why did blogs concentrate on trying to “debunk” something Israel has admitted it does sometimes do, and why wasn’t there more attention paid (both on the blogs and in the press) to the explanation Israel gives for it, and how that applies or doesn’t. It feels like they’re missing the story in favor of a tangent.

Blogging is useful in situations such as that in Baghdad where reporters dare not venture out of the ‘Green Zone’ and individuals living the nightmare outside it are able to get their stories out via blogs. But there’s nothing about the process of putting your diary on a globally-readable medium rather than scribbling it in a book that only you glance at will somehow sanitize it of the biases of the writer (or add intelligence, knowledge, or perspicacity to his or her remarks).

It is obvious that the temptation to put across a certain point of view will be increased by the knowledge of a larger readership, and that the next step is for individuals to start blogs principally to act as sources of disinformation and as a platform for their own bigotry.

Indeed, the widespread adoption of the naive view implicit in the remarks above (that in its crudest popular form amounts to little more than ‘professional journalist lazy, dishonest, and corrupt; blogger guardian of truth’) was always going to accelerate the move of organised disinformation into the realm of blogs, as well as accelerate the race of the not-so-well intentioned to ‘expose’ conventional media laziness in return for global glory and back-slapping by the self-righteous but not particularly well-informed.

If we make unfavourable comparisons between the reporters hiding in the Green Zone and the bloggers out in the realities of Baghdad, what are we doing praising the armchair Lebanon photo-analyst bloggers rather than waiting for real reports from the ground?

Blogs need to be read not with as much scepticism as conventional media, but with more. Like everything else in the bedlam of the Internet, few have much reliability as reports of anything concrete if they are not already grounded in a real-world organisation subject to peer review and with a reputation to protect.

It is surely blindingly obvious that serious research takes a great deal longer than rushing to judgment on flimsy evidence seen from a great distance, and there’s nothing that Human Rights Watch or anyone else can do about that. Nor ought we to be encouraging them to be anything other than completely painstaking.

Rushing to publication with analysis part complete will only increase the possibility of errors that no doubt would be pounced upon by those seeking to publicise an alternative narrative. And if the rush to judgement on the ‘faking’ of the ambulance incident is going to continue to have more currency than the more measured but slower to arrive final conclusion that a major human rights breach was in fact committed by Isreal, then so would the speculations of some interim report be more likely to be remembered than the later final report.

It’s the automatic and instant beatification of bloggers that’s the issue here, and the uncritical approval of the quick and the shallow. It’s the failure to distinguish between temporarily trendy medium and the quality of the content and analysis.

Readers need to be more critical, and the vampires making careers out of hyping blogging need to fasten onto some new ephemera and leave everyone else to reflect on the importance of thorough research, solid evidence, and sound reasoning, and the near irrelevance of the medium through which this is conveyed to others.

“Hezbollah launched cluster attacks that were at best indiscriminate, i.e., they violated the principle of distinction by using unguided and highly inaccurate cluster munition models against populated areas. At worst, Hezbollah deliberately attacked civilian areas with these weapons. “