In The Great Media Meltdown, I cited a Washington Post article stating that the number of artifacts missing from the Iraqi National Museum was 33. Internet journalist David Nishimura sent me an e-mail shedding more light on that report.

While agreeing that the museum story “is a fine illustration of media manipulation and overreaction,” he adds that the figure cited in my article “represents items from the main exhibit areas of the museum” and does not reflect the entire body of missing artifacts, which “are not trivial, either in terms of archeological significance or in terms of resale value.”

Nishimura’s website, Cronaca, contains extensive reporting on this story, which was recently lauded as “extraordinary work” by Andrew Sullivan, who wrote that Nishimura “owned this story from the beginning and completely out-foxed all the major media.”

Sullivan also cites Nishimura’s work as “an astonishing indication of how blogs are beginning to be among the most reliable forms of news out there.”

While it is obviously humbling to issue a factual clarification for an article critiquing the recent failures of the traditional media, this episode actually confirms many of the points made in the Media Meltdown article about how the open-source media is changing the business of reporting.