CNN: We never learned our lesson from the Eason Jordan era.
Washington Post: Hold our beer.
Alternate headline: American Public Finds New Reasons to Hate the Media.
On Friday, the Washington Post accused the US military of a potential war crime. Its reporters in Iran took photos of what were purported to be anti-tank land mines supposedly tossed into residential areas, including in Shiraz, supposedly to deter the movement of mobile missile launchers (via Twitchy):
Images posted to social media Thursday show what experts said are U.S. land mines dispersed across a residential area in southern Iran, in what appears to be the first instance in more than two decades of American forces using the weapons.
The photos show American BLU-91/B anti-tank land mines, which are released from an aircraft as part of the Gator mine scattering system, according to four munitions experts who reviewed the imagery at The Washington Post’s request. The United States is the only party in the Iran war known to possess the system.
The Post claimed that the report came from an “independent” Canadian journalist, after quoting Iran’s propagandists about the effect of the mines:
In a Telegram post Thursday, the Iranian State News Agency said at least one person had been killed and others injured as a result of the “explosive packages that resemble cans,” and it warned people to stay away from “any misshapen, deformed, or unusual metal cans.”
Central Command, which oversees U.S. operations in the region, declined to comment.
Images of the land mines were posted on social media platforms by Dimitri Lascaris, a Canadian independent journalist currently reporting from Iran and host of the “Reason2Resist” podcast, and state media outlet Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.
Ahem. For most rational people, all of that would raise a number of red flags on reliability. Just the fact that the IRGC had promoted this narrative is reason enough for skepticism, given its propensity for making absurd AI-based imagery and video to substantiate outlandish claims of Iranian victories or American setbacks. Also, a single glance at Lascaris’ Substack should have disabused anyone of the notion that Lascaris is “independent” at all in the editorial sense, with headlines such as:
The last headline, posted nine days before the Post’s headline, should have informed WaPo editors of the reliability of these “independent” reports. The use of the term “The Epstein Regime” doesn’t exactly scream independence or objective analysis.
Sometime over the weekend, the Post’s editors must have gotten enough feedback to rethink this report … a little. Rather than retract it, or rewrite it to discuss Lascaris’ obvious hostility toward the US and Israel, the editors appended a “correction” at the end. In very small and greyish type, too:
A previous version of this article incorrectly described Dimitri Lascaris, a Canadian independent journalist, as being in Iran with permission from the Iranian government and said that the people accompanying him were government representatives. He said he was invited by the state media outlet Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting and that their employees acted as guides and interpreters.
[more to come]
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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