The Guardian brushes off zombie’s exposé of the Lebanese Ambulance Fraud, stands by their reporting, and offers exactly zero evidence to support themselves: Open door. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

Two Australian newspapers, in fact, revisited the story after the country’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, accused some of the world’s “most prestigious media” of falling for a hoax. One of them, the Australian, carried its rebuttal under the heading: “Downer’s unfounded faith in the internet”, and it accused him of being hoaxed by what it called “a callous blog” (zombietime is a website not a blog). The heading on the Age story speaks for itself: “Ambulance attack evidence stands the test.”

What the zombietime website, which takes issue with both of these Australian rebuttals, does show is a fairly large number of inconsistencies and anomalies in the reporting and pictorial coverage of the event across the media: whether these are larger in number than might normally be expected to occur in reporting from a war zone is a matter for conjecture. A Guardian picture archivist with a special interest in images from areas of conflict, who carried out extensive research for me, concluded that there was cause for doubt about the nature of the munitions involved and the manner of their delivery, but not in the reality of the attack. Suzanne Goldenberg told me: “I remain confident that the story was true.” She points out that she and Sean Smith reported the story first hand and independently and did not rely on what purported to be amateur video footage of the incident.