An Army of Davids Reports

The truth. How refreshing it would be to get the truth. “Just the facts, ma’am” as Sergeant Joe Friday used to say.

Is it possible to get the truth; unvarnished by qualifiers, by adjectives, but “spin?” It is. But only with non-commercial sources and with iron quality control.

Reporting without the adjectives.

Take Qana. There is not only a question about the reason for the deaths; there is an active controversy – even within the MSM- about the number of the dead. At first, the number of dead was reported as 52. Now the number of “confirmed” dead is in the mid 20s. But let’s ask a few basic questions. And we will ask very simple but detailed questions because we are suspicious of everyone and everything.

• What is Qana?
• Was Qana attacked by the Israelis?
• If so, why was the town attacked?
• Was a building struck by Israeli weapons?
• What kind of weapon struck the building?
• When was the building struck?
• Who was in the building at the time?
• Where were they in the building?
• Why were they in the building?
• Who was killed in the building in the date of the attack?
• How do we know they died during the time in question?
• When did the building collapse?
• How do we know when the building collapsed?
• What did the collapse of the building have to do with any deaths?
• Did anyone escape from the building before it collapsed?
• Who escaped – if anyone?
• Why were the reported dead disproportionately children?
• When was rescue attempted?
• By whom was rescue attempted?
• Who documented the rescue?
• How did rescuers reach the area?
• How did the press reach the area?
• What happed to the bodies?
• Who testified to each fact?
• What documentary evidence exists of any fact?


For now, we have emotionally laden “reporting” which consists more of opinion than fact. If the number of reported dead can fluctuate from over 50 to half that number in the span of 24 hours, it is apparent that the information we are getting from the news media is suspect and false in some cases.

It is also apparent that the media is not interested in presenting facts. It is instead interested in sensationalism to sell advertising space and in furthering its own ideological agenda. This is a deadly combination in an era of ideological uniformity by the MSM, an organ that still sets the political agenda by the selection of the topics it covers and the perspective from which those points are covered.

I propose that the primary public foundations of this country combine to form an information network that is devoted to simple facts.

For example, these are indisputable facts about Qana:

• The town exists.
• It is located in Lebanon
• Areas of Qana were the target of Israeli military attacks
• Israel claims that Qana was the site of rockets launched by Hezbolla and has shown photographic evidence of rockets being launched from that area
• There is no independent proof that the objects were rockets or that the people firing them were members of any group.
• There was a building in Qana that was located near the launch sites of missiles photographed by Israeli military photographers.
• Israel claimed that it struck the area of the building at approximately midnight.
• There is a period of time, approximately 8 hours between the time that Israel claimed to have struck the area of the building and the time the media was informed of the destruction of the building and the death of its inhabitants.
• Photographers took pictures of people claiming to be rescuers holding bodies.
• The bodies were claimed by certain of these rescuers to have died in the building.

More than this we cannot know with any certainty. We have no specific independent knowledge of the identity of the bodies. We don’t now the number of bodies. We have no forensic evidence of the cause of death. We don’t know the total number of casualties. We don’t know if anyone survived the destruction of the building. We don’t have any physical evidence of rockets in the area of the building. We have no forensic evidence of the damage to the building by the Israeli munitions. We cannot be sure that the Israeli attack cause the subsequent collapse of the building - questions are being raised by Israeli sources that the time span is suspicious.

Bottom line, I have become so disenchanted by the members of the media that I would need evidence if they reported that the sun rose in the east. Reporting of disasters is notorious for its unreliability. Remember the initial death toll that was estimated by the reporters on 9/11? It was larger than the actual death toll by an order of magnitude. Most of what you think you know about the effects of Hurricane Katrina is simply wrong: about the death toll, the shooting, the rapes, the murders, the racial make-up of the victims; virtually everything was wrong. Yet the reporters’ community is still congratulating itself on the job it did during that natural disaster. And today we have reports on death and destruction in the Middle East. But here we have not mere incompetence at work; we have organized groups who determine what reporters will see and what they are told to report on. And if they deviate from the story line they face obstruction and even death. It’s little wonder that the reports we get from that part of the world bear virtually no relations to the facts.

The answer is the Truth Squad.

When lies are being represented as facts, it can be supremely useful to have someone around who can separate fact from fiction. Let’s go back to Qana.

Initial reports consistently mentioned a death toll of 52. This is a very specific number. The number du-jour is 28. Even if the Truth Squad was not able to report a more accurate number it would be useful for the Truth Squad to be able to report on whose estimate the 52 number was based and to put the actual death toll as “undetermined” absent a body count by its representative. And even that would not be enough. If you put 52 bodies in front of me and told me that they had all been killed in a bomb blast, I would have not way of knowing if you were telling me the truth without independent forensic investigation of the cause of death and the identity of the bodies. That kind of evidence is customary for legal proceedings in the American judicial system. It’s time we use that kind of evidence gathering in reporting the facts from which we derive our opinions.

At one time this kind of dispassionate analysis of fact may have been impossible. Thanks to technological advances and the internet it may now be possible to approach this level of dispassionate reporting. Perhaps we can get Glenn Reynolds to recruit an “Army of Davids” to do exactly that.