Here’s a recent piece from Press Gazette:

Were I writing a demablog – a polemical rant against the MSM (the ‘mainstream media’) – I’d probably start the piece like this: Journalists risking their lives to report on the world’s most dangerous places now have a new enemy. They risk being shot in the back by their own audience…

The demablogs are the new media rottweilers. They blog about Israel, about Iraq, but mostly the demablogs have the MSM in their sights. The latest, most disturbing case concerns the Associated Press. An AP dispatch from Baghdad in November last year reported that Shiite militiamen had “grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene.” The source quoted was an Iraqi police captain, Jamil Hussein.

The U.S. military responded by stating that an Iraqi army patrol was “unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. Neither Baghdad police nor Coalition forces have reports of any such incident.”

From this a demablog called Flopping Aces (think the Ba’athist deck of cards) fashioned a piece titled ‘Getting the news from the enemy’:

…it appears that our MSM is getting the ‘anarchy’ stories from the enemy themselves. That cannot be trusted. I mean the big story yesterday was these six burned alive and now no one can find any evidence that this happened except the word of the enemy.

How many more of these stories are embellished?

This story was amplified and retold on countless demablogs, most notably Michelle Malkin’s. Malkin had already labelled AP, “the Associated (with terrorists) Press.” Hussein did exist. He was arrested and faces charges for speaking to the media without authorization.

On one level, theirs is the Internet story we were supposed to welcome – critical, engaged media consumers questioning the product delivered from on high. Instead, the demablogs are distrustful conspiracy theorists – ready to analyze every line, take issue with every statement, not to better understand what’s going on, but to paralyze any attempt to even discover what might be happening.

Malkin’s own website lays out the demablog philosophy:

The media, for reasons of their own which appear more compelling to them than national security, long ago decided to work with America’s enemies; the most charitable conclusion is that they’re so deathly afraid of American military might becoming American imperialism, that they would rather see an America defeated, humbled, and on its knees than triumphant, dominant, and ascendent [sic].

The campaign of hate against the ‘mainstream media’ has consequences. It is underway in Israel and in Iraq. Journalists can expect to spend as much time defending controversial stories as actually reporting them.

The demablogs didn’t go after Captain Jamil Hussein because they wanted to challenge an inaccuracy. As the Columbia Journalism Review notes, they:

picked on it because they saw a chance to use a potentially false story – though it seems clear now that it might be true after all – as a way of throwing into question all the reporting from Iraq and, more specifically, undermining the characterization of the situation in the country as abysmal.

Conspiracy theorists from the other end of the political spectrum might be tempted to see some kind of ‘black’ operation behind the demablogs. But as the latest edition of Newsweek points out, in Iraq all military-related information has to be passed up “through a laborious and bureaucratic chain of command.” The former head of the U.S. military’s press operation told the magazine: “The military wants to control the environment around it, but as we try to, it only slows us down further.”

Whilst the official media apparatus struggles with hierarchies and the need to check and counter-check information, the demablogs know no such restrictions. And they have their small successes, like a Reuters photograph from Beirut that was altered to show more smoke. That revelation came from a demablog called Little Green Footballs. LGF has run over 30 posts under the title ‘The Media Are the Enemy’. It was immediately paraded as evidence of the agency’s complete untrustworthiness. Shooting the messenger now just requires a webpage and a broadband connection.

Two Associated Press employees have been killed this month. Four have died since the start of the war. AP has been robust in defending its reporting, even as its staffers are dying to bring the world a story the demablogs want to pick apart word by word, line by line. Jamil Hussein will likely be forgotten by the time the next post comes around, but he is a real person and he has been arrested. He may lose his freedom; the demablogs are not about to lose theirs.

Apologies for the lack of links…online time is limited.