LA Times and the Satellite

Blogger Patterico is all over the LA Times for supposedly editing “a Reuters story to remove critical facts supporting the U.S. position on an important international issue.”

Basically, the LA Times printed this story on the investigation into the March 4 killing of Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari by U.S. soldiers at a Baghdad checkpoint. (Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been released by Iraqi insurgents, was wounded in the assault.)

The LA Times story was a condensed version of this Reuters story. In the 16th paragraph of that 19-graph Reuters story, the wire service said that:

CBS news has reported that a U.S. satellite had filmed the shooting and that it had been established the car carrying Calipari was traveling at more than 60 mph per hour as it approached the U.S. checkpoint in Baghdad.

That paragraph, along with several others, did not appear in the nine-graph LA Times story.

Patterico calls this a “critical fact” … “definitive proof” of the car’s speed … “this is a critical issue in the controversy. What possible justification is there for the suppression of proof resolving that issue?”

Eugene Volokh also calls it a “very serious ommission.”

My take:

First, with all respect to CBS, a single report based on anonymous sources cannot be called “definitive proof.” Hardly — and it’s odd that people who have been so critical of the network before are putting such faith in it now.

Here’s what CBS actually reported on Thursday:

BOB SCHIEFFER, anchor:

The United States and Italy are struggling with a dispute over a shooting incident last month in Iraq.

American troops at a checkpoint fired on an approaching car, killing an Italian intelligence agent and wounding an Italian journalist he had just rescued from kidnappers. Well, investigators have turned up some new facts, and David Martin has our report.

DAVID MARTIN reporting:

Pentagon sources tell CBS News an American satellite recorded the incident, enabling investigators to reconstruct the event without having to rely on conflicting eyewitness accounts about how fast the car was going. The soldiers manning the checkpoint first spotted the Italian car when it was 137 yards away. By the time they opened fire and brought the car to a halt, it was 46 yards a way. That all happened in less than three seconds, which means the car had to be going over 60 miles an hour, even though Giuliana Sgrena, the just-released hostage who was wounded in the shooting, has insisted the car was going no more than 30.

Despite the satellite evidence, Italian investigators refuse to accept that the American soldiers were justified in opening fire so quickly, arguing, among other things, that the checkpoint was not properly marked so the driver had no way of knowing exactly what he was approaching.

The incident in which Italian agent Nicola Calipari was killed has overshadowed a second controversy, whether the Italians paid a ransom to Sgrena’s kidnappers. The Italians deny it, but Pentagon officials are convinced several million dollars changed hands, money they say could now be used to finance more terrorist attacks in Iraq. David Martin, CBS News, the Pentagon.

That’s the text of their entire report. And it’s only been reported by CBS — Patterico claims here it was also reported by Reuters and AFP, but that’s not quite true. AFP and Reuters reported that CBS had reported it; a big difference. They didn’t independently verify anything.

News organizations are generally nervous about reporting information that their competitors have reported but they haven’t been able to confirm themselves. I mean, we do it sometimes, but it’s a good way to get burned.

Bruce Giese writes that “the only excuse I can think of is if they had some reason to disbelieve the satellite info, but even in that case, they should still have mentioned it along with their reason for not believing it.”

This misses the point. I can’t imagine the LA Times had any additional information than what we all have here. But of course they had “reason to doubt” the CBS story: one outlet, no named sources. (Hasn’t the blogosphere taught us to be a little more skeptical of the MSM??)

Also: without seeing the satellite date, it’s a little hard to know what to make of it. I mean, is the U.S.’ interpretation of the satellite images the only reasonable one? If it’s incontrovertible, why didn’t it persuade the Italians? We’re back to a he said/she said story.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Reuters put this “key fact” in the 16th graph of a 19th graph story, as I previously noted. Remember the “interted pyramid“? Wire service reports are written so you can cut them from the bottom-up without leaving out key facts. (No, this doesn’t prove anything, other than Reuters’ news judgment comports with the LA Times’ – and mine).

UPDATE: Ace, Wizbang and the Jawa guy all express skepticism about the CBS report and the possibility of calculating a vehicle’s speed from satellite images. I don’t know enough about the subject to say one way or the other.

UPDATE 2: Iron Teakettle puts it well: “Newspapers are not blogs. They report news — they do not regurgitate stories already reported by other news organizations.” (well … some of us do, sometimes. As tabloids, both my paper and the Post do a bit of regurgitation. But we try to avoid it, and that goes double for a broadsheet like the LAT).