While I am generally an admirer of the work being done over at Flopping Aces and Confederate Yankee, I think a few minor correctives are in order. Both the Associated Press and the blogging sleuths are making different versions of the same error.

First, some backstory: The Associated Press (or AP) has cited a mysterious Iraq Police Captain named Jamil Hussein in some 61 stories over the past two years.

The AP came under fire when both the U.S. military and the Iraqi government publicly declared that Captain Jamil Hussein did not exist. Let’s pause here for minute. Large bureaucracies do not make definitive statements, especially voluntary ones, unless they have checked first. Even the dimmest p.r. bulb knows that the press will search official police lists just to have their gotcha moment. So one would think that both the military’s and Iraqi government’s would give the AP pause.

The AP’s weak response? The creation of official membership lists is actually a new thing. Predictably, they are standing by their “source” and their reporters. They have to. If they bent to pressure, the pressure on them from all sides would climb by orders of magnitude.

Several online journalists, especially Flopping Aces and Michele Malkin, noticed how strange it was for the U.S. military and its Iraqi ally to be so definitive in denying the existence of Capt. Jamil Hussein. So they started digging.

Flopping Aces came up with a list of 61 AP reports—covering some 25 attacks—that cite Jamil Hussein. At best, that seems like on over-reliance on a source that is not a high-ranking official or an official spokesman.

Now Confederate Yankee has Googled his way through 40 of the 61 accounts. He was searching for reports from other news agencies that match AP’s—and thereby confirm AP’s account. He found only four semi-confirmations.

Now for the commentary: Confederate Yankee was a wonderfully 1940s, Front Page view of the press. In fact, one should NOT expect to find other news agencies covering the same events as AP. (This is why trust is so vital and AP is dumb to gamble with dodgy sources.)

Today, news agencies rarely compete on purpose. When they do, it is on major stories. So the mere fact that AP is reporting a minor story, like an attack on mosque or a gunned down government worker, is a reason from AFP and others not to bother. Why bother? the editor will say, AP has got it. If we need it, we will simply rewrite their copy when it moves on the wire. So Confederate Yankees’ lack of corroboration is meaningless.

Second, you might find plenty of meaningless corroboration. The agencies rewrite each other, often without credit. In remote locations where real friendships develop, they might freely hand their “rivals” their copy. I’ve seen it happen in Darfur and elsewhere. Add to that, at many local and regional papers, many reporters start off with dull but necessary job of rewriting wire copy—with no additional reporting.

Besides, even if Confederate Yankee found other wire reports that “verified” AP’s account, what does that prove? Hussein, if he exists, could be the source for both, and simply not credited in the second account. Or the second account could have been created hundreds of miles away by a reporter rewriting AP copy without (or with minimal) attribution. This happens all the time.

As for AP’s defense, “we’ve been using Hussein as a source for two years and we only just started getting complaints” is equally mistaken. How would anyone know that Hussein is a fiction or not? AP enjoys a monopoly on most of its stories. There is no other credentialed journalist around to say that AP is wrong. So the lack of complaints is also meaningless.

A speculation: I suspect that some long-serving U.S. military public affairs officer got tired of what he thought of as pro-insurgent reports from this Iraqi police captain and complained through channels that this guy shouldn’t be talking to the press. The Iraqis investigated and said we don’t have anyone named Jamil Hussein. The military that checked and cross-checked the records and came to the same conclusion. If this anonymous PAO had put his head above the parapet, no one would be questioning the AP now.

Why this story matters: Virtually all English-language newsgathering rests on a few thin legs, a leviathan balanced on a few pins. Those tethers are wire services. There are only a few of them: AP, AFP, Reuters, UPI and few others. Those wires tell news outfits what is happening and they, in turn, refine, add (through reporting), comment, and combine. The enemy is brilliant at analyzing our systems and finding weak points. It would be very easy to plant a false story with AP and have it appear in hundreds of newspapers, radio stations and tv networks the next day. What steps are AP and the other wires doing to ensure that are not being duped by an enemy (aka insurgent) information-warfare campaign?

The old computer-science rule “garbage in, garbage out” applies here too. What if Jamil Hussein was the pseudonym of an insurgent who phoned the AP with phony reports? And the AP reporter, who thought the stories were too good to check, didn’t look into his source?

The only way to prove that Hussein is a legitimate source is to send a camera crew to the two police stations that Hussein is said to have used. Ask the desk officer (or equivalent) if they know him or have heard of him? Look at the official roll of the past two years and see if his name, or a variation, appears. And so on. Shoe-leather is what will resolve this story and invite some Iraq-based bloggers to use it.

As for AP, they would wise to get ahead of this story. Either produce Hussein or own up to the error and announce new safeguards. Rotating out the reporter who used the dubious source would also be a good idea. If not, the venerable AP could move into Dan Rather territory fast—and that would be a tragedy not only for them, but for all of us.