When obvious, undisputed, and easily checked facts are incorrectly reported

The article is a bit over-dramatic, though not wrong. From Defending Obama: Washington Post Says Only TWO Americans Were Killed In Benghazi by Nina Bookout.

Guess what? Only TWO Americans were killed in Benghazi. That’s according to a Washington Post reporter who is turning himself into a pretzel defending Obama. In his efforts to slam Trump’s actions in killing noted terrorist Soleimani, he writes the following:

“Trump did not mention Obama in brief remarks about the Soleimani operation Friday. But days earlier — as an Iraqi militia aligned with the Iranian general breached security at the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in protest of an American strike on the group’s facilities in Syria and Iraq — Trump made a clear reference to his predecessor by threatening Iran over the incident and declaring the situation the “Anti-Benghazi” on Twitter.

He was alluding to a siege on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya in 2012 in which two Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stephens, were killed — a tragedy for which Republicans faulted Obama’s administration for not securing the facility and for a muddied public accounting of what happened.””

Holy moly batman. That’s not a stretch, that’s a willful editing of actual history in an article obsessing over Trump’s supposed obsession with Obama.

Bookout takes quite a while to make the obvious point. In an infamous attack on the American embassy in Benghazi just eight years ago, four Americans died.

Yes, there is a whole political dimension to be discussed which Bookout focuses on.

I am more interested in the simple news-reporting aspect of this. Ten years ago is not a long time. Benghazi was not an underreported event. How does one of the nation's main news generators get a fundamental fact wrong. A fact which is undisputed. A fact which could be checked by googling. A fact which they have documented in their own archives.

The author of the article, David Nakamura is not a Ben Rhodes young know-nothing journalist. This is not a clumsy tweet error, it is right there in the article. Nor is it a headline error, again, right there in the article.

It is easy to imagine not remembering the details precisely (though I would have thought a great majority of news readers would have gotten the correct answer of four). And while the fact of four is not a crucial one to Nakamura's argument, it is sufficiently relevant that you would have thought he would have checked just to be certain. And where are the editors? Did this just not get edited? Or did it get edited and the editor also failed to alert to a fairly obvious error?

And to be clear, I think this is solely an error. I doubt that there is any intent to misrepresent.

It is just startling to see such an obvious error into circulation. And even more astonishing to see that it has not been corrected even after it is out in the open for a couple of days with people pointing it out.

I can only guess that it speaks to a continuing decimation of the editorial quality control in the mainstream media.

UPDATE: After writing this, I saw another report which casts a slightly different light. From Washington Post national security reporter retweets blatant pro-Iran propaganda. Her own outlet reports the exact opposite by Phil Shiver.

The substance of the article is that Washington Post military and national security reporter Missy Ryan retweeted a pro-Iran tweet in order to score points off of President Trump.

A wapo natsec columnist RTing this is why media employers will soon be forced to stop all of you from tweeting anything that’s not a link to your own edited and curated work. pic.twitter.com/Z2CE7XuXJx

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) January 6, 2020

Fair enough. That's pretty stupid. What is more striking is the context of her tweeting.

Reporting from Ryan's own news outlet is at odds with the image being spread on the internet.

On Monday, the Post ran a story by Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and Post contributor, titled: "Don't believe Iranian propaganda about the mourning for Soleimani."

"Over the next few days, it will be hard to escape footage of huge crowds gathering in Iranian cities to mourn the death of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general killed by a U.S. drone strike. For anyone watching, I have one piece of advice: Don't take what you're seeing at face value," Alinejad suggested.

Evidently, Ryan didn't get the memo.

The article cited the massive protests that had erupted throughout Iran over the past several months, in which at least 1,500 people were killed by security forces — including forces under Soleimani's leadership.

Alinejad said she has received thousands of messages from Iranians saying they are elated about Soleimani's death and that the demonstrations are largely contrived.

She reported that the Iranian government has forced students to hit the streets in mourning, providing free transport and shutting down shops. Children have been made to write essays praising Soleimani; the ones who cannot write are encouraged to cry for him.

Peddling pro-Iranian propaganda is pretty stupid. Doing so when your own paper's reporting contradicts the tweet is . . . well, best left undescribed. She is a fellow Hoya alum even if her degree was in English Literature.

All of which suggests a different way to view what is going on at the paper. Perhaps it is more than that all the downsizing has led to a loss of quality control through the absence of editorial staff.

Perhaps what has happened is that in the old model, there was an editorial voice which reporters learned from their editors.

Without those editors, not only do mistakes get through, but there is now no longer any consistent editorial voice or stance. All the newspaper is anymore is a portfolio of contributors with no consistent view or voice. Its own journalists are not reading their own paper.