- BBC news chiefs have met
to discuss the increasing problem of misinformation coming out of Iraq
as staff concern grows at the series of premature claims and counter claims
by military sources.
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- As a result the corporation has reinforced the message
to correspondents that they must clearly attribute information to the military
when it has not been backed up by another source.
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- "There's been a discussion about attribution and
it's been reinforced with people that we do have to attribute military
information," said a BBC spokeswoman.
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- "We have to be very careful in the midst of a conflict
like this one to be very sure when we're reporting something we've not
seen with our own eyes that we attribute it," she added.
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- On nearly every day of the war so far there have been
reports that could be seen as favourable to coalition forces, which have
later turned out to be inaccurate.
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- Earlier this week there was confusion over whether there
had been an uprising in the key southern city of Basra. A British forces
spokesman, Group Captain Al Lockwood, said on Thursday there had been a
"popular uprising", but this was denied by Iraqi authorities.
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- By last Sunday the southern Iraqi seaport of Umm Qasr
had been reported "taken" nine times, while reports of the discovery
of a chemical weapons factory in An Najaf have not been confirmed - just
two more examples of the confusion over what is coming out of military
sources.
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- "We're absolutely sick and tired of putting things
out and finding they're not true. The misinformation in this war is far
and away worse than any conflict I've covered, including the first Gulf
war and Kosovo," said a senior BBC news source.
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- "On Saturday we were told they'd taken Basra and
Nassiriya and then subsequently found out neither were true. We're getting
more truth out of Baghdad than the Pentagon at the moment. Not because
Baghdad is putting out pure and morally correct information but because
they're less savvy about it, I think.
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- "I don't know whether they [the Pentagon] are putting
out flyers in the hope that we'll run them first and ask questions later
or whether they genuinely don't know what's going on - I rather suspect
the latter."
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- Earlier this week the BBC's director of news, Richard
Sambrook, admitted it was proving difficult for journalists in Iraq to
distinguish truth from false reports, and that the pressures facing reporters
on 24-hour news channels had led to premature or inaccurate stories.
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- Veteran war correspondent Martin Bell has called for
24-hour news channels to "curb their excitability" and warned
against unsubstantiated reports which may help the allied cause, but later
turn out to be false.
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- The Times journalist Janine di Giovanni has also said
that the demands of real-time television, combined with the restrictions
placed on reporters in Baghdad by the Iraqis and the difficulties of getting
to the front line are making it virtually impossible for journalists to
cover the war properly.
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,924172,00.html
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