Counterfeit News Indeed

David Frum at the American Enterprise Institute (HT Little Green Footballs via e-mailer Larwyn) supplies a correction one probably will not see where it would matter (I added links related posts at the blogs Frum cited; I could not locate a related MyPetJawa link):

Perhaps you saw the images in your newspaper or on television:

“A Lebanese man counts U.S dollar bills received from Hizbollah members in a school in Bourj el-Barajneh, a southern suburb of Beirut, August 19, 2006. Hizbollah handed out bundles of cash on Friday to people whose homes were wrecked by Israeli bombing, consolidating the Iranian-backed group’s support among Lebanon’s Shiites and embarrassing the Beirut government. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard (LEBANON)”

This scene and dozens more like it flashed around the planet. Only one thing was missing–the thin wire security strip that runs from top to bottom of a genuine US$100 bill. The money Hezbollah was passing was counterfeit, as should have been evident to anybody who studied the photographs with due care.

Care was due because of Hezbollah’s history of counterfeiting: In June, 2004, the U.S. Department of the Treasury publicly cited Hezbollah as one of the planet’s leading forgers of U.S. currency.

But this knowledge was disregarded by the news organizations who queued up to publicize Hezbollah’s pseudo-philanthropy. The passing of counterfeit bills was detected not by the reporters and photographers on the spot, but by bloggers thousands of miles away: SnappedShots.com (here and here), MyPetJawa, and Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs. These sites magnified photographs and showed them to currency experts and detected irregularity after irregularity in the bills.
Maybe it’s too much to expect journalists to be currency experts …..

Stop. Right. There.

Maybe the journalists aren’t. But given Hezbollah’s forgery history, Reuters and others owed the world a close examination of the photos before releasing them. It is the height of irresponsibility that they did no such thing.

The press’s Arab-state paymasters are surely pleased that no amount of noise in the blogosphere, or agate-type corrections in publications that ran the original stories, will make up for the false impressions of generosity the compliant press helped Hezbollah create.