National Journal published an extensive and revealing look at how Jihadist propaganda ends up being (unwittingly?) carried by the western media:

Thanks to digital technology, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most photographed in history. Photographers with digital cameras have provided, almost instantaneously, an enormous flood of accurate, dramatic, and even shocking images to people around the world. But the daily downloads of news photos include some that are staged, fake, or so lacking in context as to be meaningless, despite the Western media’s best efforts to separate the factual from the fictional.

On January 14, for example, shortly after unmanned U.S. aircraft fired missiles at several suspected leaders of Al Qaeda who were thought to be staying in the village of Damadola, Pakistan, Agence France-Presse distributed a picture said to be from the scene. AFP is based in Paris, and the picture was sent by one of its locally hired photographers, a stringer. The photo showed a piece of military equipment placed on a damaged stone wall, flanked by a solemn old man and a young boy. Another firm, Getty Images, also distributed the photo to picture editors at newspapers and magazines around the world. The New York Times published it in the paper’s January 14 Web edition, and Time magazine ran the picture in its January 23 print edition, along with the caption “Detritus from the latest U.S. raid in Pakistan.”

But the caption was wrong, the pose was staged, and the picture was, in essence, untrue. The initial AFP caption said that the military object was a piece of a missile from the U.S. strike. Later, AFP issued a correction, labeling the object an unexploded artillery shell.

But it was not a U.S. shell. It was most likely a fired but unexploded artillery shell, identical to those manufactured by Pakistan Ordnance Factories and it was brought there from somewhere else and posed atop the wall. These steel shells are used by the Pakistani military; one would not be a part of a U.S. missile. In fact, the AFP’s stringer, Thir Kahn, had taken a September photo of a very similar shell seized from Islamic militants by the Pakistani military.

[...]

In Iraq, “we keep two to three [in-house] photographers there year-round,” said Elizabeth Flynn, foreign-picture editor for The New York Times’ print edition, which did not publish the AFP picture of the misidentified artillery shell. “I try to rely on and use what they shoot, because we trust them, we know them.” The AFP stringer’s photo “is the kind of picture you desperately want to have because [the missile strike] was a big story,” she said, but when people “gather around like a family photo, that should raise a hundred red flags.”

And yet, for some reason, it didn’t raise those red flags for many outlets. Was the picture that the Times “desperately want[ed] to have” yet another one of those stories that was “too good to fact-check” for much of the media? It sure seems that way.

The common theme among the false pictures cited in the National Journal article is that they all reflect poorly on the United States and the war effort. The media is quite skeptical of the claims made by the U.S. military, and rightly so. One of jobs of the media—aside from reporting what happened—is to ensure that they’re giving the public factual information, and that requires proof, which in turn requires a healthy dose of skepticism. It would be nice if the media applied the same level of skepticism to information received from al Qaeda sympathizers and Iraqi insurgents.

But it seems the media applies different standards of proof depending on the source of the information. This weakness of our media is being exploited by our enemies, who use the media’s Vietnam-era disdain for the American military as part of their war strategy. The article quotes an intercepted communication from Osama bin Laden to Taliban leader Mullah Omar:

“It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its share may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles.”

If the media can be used as a tool to wear down the resolve of the American public, then voters will demand that politicians pull back in the fight against al Qaeda and the Jihadists. This is something they understand. It’s time we did, too.