Saeed al-Sahhaf, ex-Information Minister of Iraq, has found a new job, as a commentator on the UAE station Abu Dhabi TV. Sahhaf was also known as Comical Ali, as Aftenposten helpfully reminds us:

Saeed al-Sahhaf became a cult figure during the war for his daily briefings on how Iraq was about to win. It didn't take long before the West nick-named him "Comical Ali".

Ah yes, the notorious statements of Comical Ali. Funny stuff. But it's rude of Aftenposten to retell the joke but leave out the punch line: It worked. Sahhaf did not become a cult figure "during the war", except perhaps in the openly pro-war Western media. It did take long before he got his nickname. "Comical Ali" didn't arrive in Norway sooner than April 8 or 9, when the war was over. Up to that point, Comical Ali was merely Saeed al-Sahhaf, and reporters didn't laugh at his jokes. They took notes.

Here are some of the statements made by Sahhaf during the war that Aftenposten (and NTB) quoted without any critical comment:

March 21: The enemy forces will regret the attack, and "we will not let them escape the quagmire they have entered".
March 23: "These cowards and mercenaries have taken civilian Iraqis prisoner", (referring to reports of surrendering troops.)
March 24: 77 civilians killed, 366 wounded during bombing of Basra. (Later 62/400.)
March 25: 16 civilians killed, 95 wounded in Baghdad.
March 26: "The situation is stable. The resistance continues, and we're teaching them several lessons. Reports about a rebellion are due to a feeling of frustration among the British". (Referring to a supposed uprising in Basra.)
March 26: 12 tanks surrounded and destroyed near Nassiriya; British forces used cluster bombs; 500 civilians wounded; Americans and British not in control of Umm Qasr.
March 26: 116 civilians killed, 700 wounded in Basra since beginning of war; "Enemy forces hit civilian areas in Najaf before our forces forced them back"; American and British forces had to withdraw 50km after battles near Baghdad; 33 American tanks destroyed.
March 29: "Blair has begun a psychological war against us. We haven't liquidated anyone. Those two have either fallen on the battlefield or been captured." (Referring to Allsopp and Cullingworth.)
March 29: 68 civlians killed, 107 wounded.
March 29: "The coalition force is like a snake. It's 500km long, and we will cut it to pieces."
March 30: US chopper shot down, another exploded.
April 1: 43 Americans and Brits killed over the weekend, 13 tanks ++ destroyed. "It is these international criminals who gave orders to kill Iraqis because they were Iraqis. They are racists", referring to "stupid Bush" and "hysterical Blair".
April 1: Americans bombed bus with American human shields.
April 3: 10 000 holy warriors on their way to Iraq.
April 4: Claims of American advance "idiotic". US forces "aren't even remotely close to being near Baghdad". "They are in constant movement. They're like a snake in the desert. They don't control any part of Iraq."
April 5: American forces around Baghdad will be met with a "non-conventional" attack, and will find it difficult to escape alive.
April 5: "Everything all right" in Baghdad. Republican guard in full control of Baghdad Airport. "We have beaten the invaders, we have destroyed them."
April 6: Footage supposedly from Baghdad in reality taken 30-40km away.
April 6: 50 American soldiers killed, 16 tanks destroyed during fighting near airport.

All these statements were quoted neutrally, as in "the US says .. but Iraq says", with no deliberate weight on one or the other, (except that more words were often dedicated to the US version). The last neutral mention of Sahhaf was made on April 6. On the same day, Per Egil Hegge wrote Aftenposten's first critical column about him. By April 8, Aftenposten and NTB left readers no doubt that Sahhaf could not be trusted.

You'll notice that not all these claims were entirely false. There probably was no uprising in Basra, Umm Qasr was harder to capture than the British claimed, and those two British soldiers may not have been executed after all. But even so, the statements by Sahhaf added no value whatsoever to any of these articles. Sahhaf had one single message throughout the war: We are winning, and the invaders are evil and weak. He stuck to that message from the beginning to the end. All he did was adapt it to the battlefield of the moment. We're winning in Umm Qasr, we're winning in Basra, we're winning in Najaf, we're winning in Baghdad. It was his job - on pain of death - to say that. So why was he quoted at all? Why did Aftenposten and NTB (and most of the Western media, but that aside for now) give their readers the impression that Sahhaf's information had any value? To be fair to Aftenposten, the worst of the articles above are all from NTB, Norway's primary wire service. But Aftenposten chose to publish them, often quoting Sahhaf in the headline.

The answer is partly that Sahhaf told everyone what they wanted to hear: that the Americans were in trouble in Iraq, and that the war was killing many civilians. Most Norwegian journalists would after two seconds reflection conclude that although many US and British claims were exaggerated or false, almost all Iraqi claims were completely made up. But the need to justify their earlier warnings about quagmire and humanitarian disaster forced journalists to quote the only source still making those claims, even if he was completely unreliable.

But another part of the answer is the belief I've written about before, that neutrality and objectivity is the same thing. To be objective on an issue, all you have to do is to pick the position inbetween the extremes, or treat all the extremes as equally reliable. Not any extreme will do - only those that are inside an acceptable range of opinions. There is no neutrality on whether the Holocaust took place - revisionism is not acceptable. But the claims that Sahhaf made about the war in Iraq were all inside the acceptable range, so they were treated with respect. You couldn't just write that "anything the Iraqis say is completely rubbish". That would be picking sides, it wouldn't be objective.

But of course objectivity is the opposite of neutrality. Objectivity is to strive towards the truth, and if there's one place we can be sure of not finding the truth it's in between two extremes. All we'll find is something that looks truthful, and doesn't offend, which perhaps is all that's required of a news report. Sahhaf and Saddam knew that, and built their media strategy on it.

And that's Comical Ali's big punch line. He did his job, and he did it well. He exploited the lack of professionalism among Western journalists to spread lies, and it worked. The joke's on us in the West, and it's not very funny.

Bjorn:
You touch on something that I think about all the time.

I perceive not one (balance) but two interrelated forces at work. The one you don't mention is the surfeit of information. Sometimes it is incomplete, frex "fog of war". Sometimes it's conflicting, frex Sahhaf. Then there is deadline pressure, and the desire to scoop the competition.

The reporter doesn't know the facts--can't, but must file a story. So any nonsense is reported, for "balance". Actually, it's just a form of CYA; the reporter can't be wrong if what he reports is "he said, she said".

One obvious downside to such failures is that the most egregious liars gain the advantage, because of a tendency among readers and listeners to split the difference. Another is that the more careful sources respond to outrageous claims without countering them firmly, because they haven't yet investigated fully, and don't wish to deny even remote possibilities. The press the runs wild with rumor and speculation. "Jessica Lynch as gunman" is an example, as is the "Jenin massacre".

What, strangely, doesn't seem to enter is is "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".

It would be interesting to see a study of official statements from US, British, or Israeli sources, and in how many instances they were false--unhedged assertions that proved incorrect and were not quickly corrected. I suspect the number is quite small. (I'm not talking about omission or emphasis here; I expect spin.) Yet it seems that establishing a track record counts for nothing; every incident gives opposing accounts equal weight. There would seem to be no rational basis for ignoring experience, other than a$$-covering. Heaven forbid a reporter exercise some editorial judgment, as that opens a possibility of error. Reporters don't err; that's a given /snark off/.

I largely agree with Alene in the first comment, except insofar as corrections/retractions which seem not to be issued often enough by the press. This even affects the press itself, as with the two Lynch stories (capture and rescue) and "plastic turkey", which some major media articles still report incorrectly: stay with the first version, do no research...

Yes, there is the lighttning-fast propagation of error, possibly corrected in the original report, and the correction not picked up by those who disseminated the original. And even more peculiar is the all-too-frequent backsliding of the first, corrected source, whose own opinion columnists repeat the erroneous version. Laziness and perception bias are a foul brew.

April 1: Americans bombed bus with American human shields.

This is the first I've heard of this. Damn... How I hope it's true!

Damn you, Bjørn. :)

I have been collecting for weeks, working to bypass the Norwegian newspaper's reluctance to be googlable, and here you make a great summary of the whole case: how Norwegian journalists took al-Sahaf absolutely seriously until American tanks invaded Baghdad unopposed.

You are right: he is a joke, but Norwegian journalists are even more so, because he was doing his job.

Jan: http://start.no/nyheter ;) Complete back to early 2002.

I have noticed that some of the most biased and sloppy news stories are filed by NTB, sometimes in collusion with AFP and Reuters. Since NTB is owned and funded by Norwegian media companies and is largely unnecessary given news.google.com and other news aggregators, I think the whole organization should be shut down. It's a cesspool.

Journalists are supposedly taught to use sources critically. When one party or another consistently lies and misleads journalists, the penalty has to be lost credibility. I'm not sure if Western journalists would have had the courage to write "Ali said this, but Ali usually lies," but one should expect serious news media (of which none exist in Norway) to periodically analyze their sources after the fact to see which ones were truthful.

U.S., British and other military PR people are very good at omitting and spinning facts, but they don't want to be caught lying.

Now this is amusing. The links to the naive Aftenposten articles no longer work. It gets to an "article not found" page.

The link to the first critical article on al-Sahaf, on the other hand, still works.

I read through the links just a couple of days ago, when the article was new...

Jan: Lol, don't attribute it to me. Aftenposten's website seems to have problems today. Lots of articles not there.

Heh. I try not to be paranoid, but that was actually quite astonishing!

But now the stories are back up again. Phew!

The media can solve these problems by reporting what Iraq says, but very briefly, thus hinting that the source is not known to be particularly reliable. The media did not do this because they really suspected that the US was lying, and that was their big mistake.

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