BIAS?

A Mugging in Reuterville (James Taranto, 7/24/03, Best of the Web)

On Tuesday we noted that Reuters had published an anti-American screed about the Jessica Lynch story:

Jessica Lynch, the wounded Army private whose ordeal in Iraq was hyped into a media fiction of U.S. heroism, was set for an emotional homecoming on Tuesday in a rural West Virginia community bristling with flags, yellow ribbons and TV news trucks.

But when the 20-year-old supply clerk arrives by Blackhawk helicopter to the embrace of family and friends, media critics say the TV cameras will not show the return of an injured soldier so much as a reality-TV drama co-produced by U.S. government propaganda and credulous reporters.

It turns out even the byline was a lie. Reuters attributed the story to Deanna Wrenn, who we later learned is a reporter for the Daily Mail, an afternoon paper in Charleston, W.Va. Out of curiosity, we went to the Daily Mail's Web site and read Wrenn's account of Pfc. Lynch's homecoming. It reads nothing at all like the Reuters piece:

Jessica Lynch looked and sounded great, residents and visitors said after she rode through town on a Mustang convertible.

But many wanted to get a longer glimpse of the 20-year-old Army private they consider a hero.

"She looked absolutely beautiful," said Angie Kinder, who came from Huntington with her two girls, Grace, 4, and Caroline, 1. "I expected her to look worse."

The piece continues in this vein, without a hint of Reuterian anti-Americanism. In a column in today's Daily Mail, which the paper generously permitted us to reprint, Deanna Wrenn explains what happened.

It's our general policy not to link to stories in Best of the Web, Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, etc., on the understanding that no one starts their day here and nearly everyone will have visited all those bigger sites first. But this story really pisses me off. (Pardon my French, as two more rules get broken: self-reference and scatology.) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 24, 2003 6:53 PM