More phony news from ABC

I found an interesting story on Page 21A of the Dallas Morning News today, bylined AP.

The question asked by the editor of Politique Internationale was "how could we possibly doubt someone who worked for ABC, who worked for the Nixon Center? How could we possibly doubt someone from several thousand kilometers away?"

That last part? I have no idea.... but the gist of his rhetorical questions is this:

We trusted a 'journalist' because he had credentials as a 'journalist'.

Riiiighhht.

And while Alexis Debat has now acknowledged that he never conducted any of the interviews which appeared under his byline, including Pelosi, SecDef Gates, Greenspan, and even Barack Obama, the editor of this French magazine is saying things like "we are the first victims. I am falling from the moon. We were betrayed."

Again, Alexis Debat was a 'consultant' for ABC News. He authored, among other things, an interview with Barack Obama in which the candidate 'says' the Iraq war is "a defeat for America".

And now Obama, Greenspan, Pelosi, Gates, even Annan and Bloomberg, are saying they never spoke to Alexis Debat; the interviews published in Politique Internationale are fake.

The magazine is in full defense mode, calling Debat a "grand liar" and promising all sorts of lawsuits against him, presumably to retrieve the good name of Politique Internationale.

And yet, in one instance, Debat recalls how he drafted questions for the political figures, and the magazine accepted the questions and sent back "answers" which Debat then reworked and translated, and sent back with his byline. In other words, the magazine knowingly collaborated with him in producing these fake interviews.

This is another in a seemingly endless series of fake news stories, news fakers, enhancers and exaggerators. Each individual episode serves to undermine further this carefully crafted foundation of high ethics, high standards and devotion to the truth which has served journalists so well these past several decades, but was probably never true.

After all, how much special training does it really take to--

1) Ask questions

2) Find out what happened, to whom, when, and where

3) Assemble a narrative....?

In the good old days, a newspaperman was a shirtsleeved chainsmoking blue-collar type who could write about things because he had lived them. That was before the days of Columbia Journalism School and all the effete and elite academies where young soft brains were massaged leftward and an anti-Western subtext was taught for almost all stories.

This magazine printed fake journalism. Published a fraud. Now it's time to save the reputation, if in fact it can be done. Monsieur Debat will have something to say about this, I'm sure, given the tidbit he's already passed along about the magazine faking answers for his 'interviews'.

"I am falling from the moon. We were betrayed", whines the editor, with the distinct overtones of the guilty dog barking the loudest.

Somewhere there's a list of these episodes of fraudulent journalism. Whoever's keeping the list, add ABC News (again) and this French leftist political magazine to it, if you please...

And note that, even without the list, we can confidently say that of all the instances of fake stories and fake facts and fake photographs and fake interviews with fake people (including fake Lebanese women and fake Iraqi women with fake spent ammo and fake corpses and fake ambulances and fake victims), there is not one instance of any of these stunts being used to enhance or support the traditional, pro-western, pro-Israel, pro-American strength, pro-conservative point of view.

NOT ONE.

Out of dozens of instances that we've caught (and therefore presumably many more we haven't), every single known instance is designed to support the pro-left, anti-American, anti-Israel, pro socialism, pro-Muslim, anti-Bush point of view.

EVERY ONE.

And if you can't see this clearly, ask the guy next to you to give you a crisp backhand across the face. You need it.