Before the Newspeak Affair There Was...

Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette reviews the past MSM foibles that are the prelude to the Great Quran Desecration That Wasn't. In January, 2004, CNN (and others, I believe?) published accusations that US troops ripped up a Quran and desecrated a mosque in Iraq. Fortunately there was a video of the raid that debunked the charges and showed a mosque full of machine guns and bomb-making supplies. Also:

In April 2004 the LA Times declared a journalistic jihad, defending the display of graphic images of murdered contractors in Fallujah and forthrightly announcing their intention to display any and all such images they could: 'While showing the images could erode support for the war, not showing them could have an opposite effect.' claimed the Times. [...]

'May, 2004: Mary Mapes, a producer for CBS' 60 Minutes, was handed abuse photos by the family of an accused torturer. Seymour Hersh, writer for The New Yorker magazine, (who coincidentally knew the same soldier's attorney from the My Lai trial) also received copies from an undisclosed source. Hersh and Mapes resulting stories are still considered the definitive version of events at Abu Ghraib by those who aren't concerned with facts. No more egregious example of misleading spin will ever be found. (Hopefully)"

See this Greyhawk post for the real story of Abu Ghraib.

Then a Boston City Councilor, Chuck Turner, held a press conference where he showed pictures purportedly of "US soldiers raping Iraqi women." The Boston Globe played it up big, but it was soon found that the pictures were staged photos, downloaded from a porn site.

Once the phony "facts" are out there, the truth has a hard time replacing them.

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