CNN trumpets Iraq Body Count numbers-UPDATE

Last week, Stephen Spruiell at NRO’s Media Blog noted how CNN reported alleged casualty numbers from the notoriously left wing Iraq Body Count website and treated them as credible numbers. In my blog entry about the CNN piece, I noted the following:

They are referred to as “the group” – not an “anti-war group” (7/26/05 8pm: lined through to reflect my re-reading of the article, where they were referred to as the “anti-war group – I missed that the first time around. Point about them still not being called a “liberal group” still stands, however. –ST) or “liberal group” but just simply “the group.” If this were a Republican and/or conservative based group, you know very well that description would have been noted straightaway, no doubt in order to subtly discredit the conservative group’s findings right out of the gate.

Today, Sprueill has a follow-up piece to his original posting about this at NRO that asks that very question:

The media coverage of this report, by and large, failed to convey that uncertainty to the public. Nor did it convey the nature of the Iraq Body Count organization, a hard-left anti-war group with a clear agenda. Nor did it convey, as Stephen Pollard reported in this piece for the London Times, that a member of this group, Marc Herold, had “attempted this trick before, when he ‘revealed’ in December 2001 that there were then 3,800 civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The now-accepted figure at the time was two thirds less — about 1,200.” Most stories simply repeated the allegations in the group’s press release, occasionally followed by a statement from a U.S. or Iraqi authority.

Fox News anchor Brit Hume gave the truth about Iraq Body Count a hearing on Special Report last Thursday when he reported the group’s hard-left ties. Will the rest of the media follow suit and apologize for passing off antiwar propaganda as hard facts?

I won’t hold my breath.

Related: The AP is whitewashing terrorists via humanizing them and calling them ‘activists’ rather than ‘terrorists’ – and Jay Tea is rightly outraged.

Also: See Stephen Green’s post I linked up with a few days ago about how the NYTimes one-sided reporting about the shooting of the Brazilian man mistaken for a terrorist shows exactly who’s side the many in the MSM are on in the War On Terror. Hint: it’s not ours. But that shouldn’t surprise you.