Is the Associated Press playing a numbers game in its reporting on a massacre in Iraq?
Stories about ISIS massacring 300 Yazidi captives have appeared in several places. Leftists and Obama administration's apologists who want to believe that the number involved is just a figment of the imaginations of UK tabloid troublemakers and U.S. right-wing bloggers can't use that copout to explain away a report from their venerable BBC:
Islamic State: Militants 'kill 300 Yazidi captives'Several hundred Yazidi captives have been killed in Iraq by Islamic State (IS) militants west of Mosul, Yazidi and Iraqi officials say.
A statement from the Yazidi Progress Party said 300 captives were killed on Friday in the Tal Afar district near the city.
Iraqi Vice-President Osama al-Nujaifi described the reported deaths as "horrific and barbaric".
Thousands of members of the religious minority group were captured last year.
It is not clear how they were killed, or why this has happened now, says the BBC's Middle East editor Alan Johnston.
Many are reported to have been held in Mosul, the main stronghold of IS after the militants swept through large areas of northern and western Iraq, and eastern Syria in 2014.
Yazidis, whose religion includes elements of several faiths, are considered infidels by IS.
The BBC is arguably a worse leftist fever swamp than the AP and the Times, but it ran with a multiple-sourced story, including a quote from a named Iraqi official.
The list of those reporting 300 deaths is long, and a few reports, and a few reports, including this one, are claiming that the number is really much higher:
As of 9:30 this morning, the Associated Press would only report that the number killed is "at least 25."
The wire service seems to be leaning on just one conversation with a "Yasidi lawmaker" to justify not reporting a higher number.
Saturday afternoon, an unbylined AP report appearing at the New York Times reported the following:
Although the one person AP cited said he spoke to four different people, the fact remains that AP appears to have relied solely on Khalil. The BBC report above cited "Yazidi and Iraqi officials."
Somehow, the BBC and the legion of news sources noted above got to a much larger number with multiple sources. Despite that, the early Sunday morning report from AP, still present at its national site at 9:30, sticks with the lower figure:
The use of "at least" seems to be a way of being technically correct without accurately communicating the true extent of the horror.
It doesn't seem likely, but perhaps the wire service will wind up having been more correct, and the death toll will end up being closer to their number than everyone else's. It's sadly not unreasonable to believe that AP is holding out as long as it can before it concedes the higher number. If so, the excuse that they relied on one supposedly credible guy shouldn't wash.
I'll mostly leave it to others to attempt to identify why AP is seemingly being so stubborn, except to note that it will be awfully suspicious if the number goes up to everyone else's this afternoon after the Sunday talk shows in the U.S. have concluded.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
