Bolt: Not the Hole Truth

Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 11:48:01 am PDT

At Australia’s Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt makes some excellent points about the Lebanese ambulance controversy, as mainstream media in the US continues to completely ignore the story: Not the hole truth.

IT’S bad enough that friends of Hezbollah terrorists could trick so many journalists with just a tall story and a rusty Lebanese ambulance.

Worse is that some of those journalists seemed so eager to believe this ambulance was indeed wickedly blown up by an Israeli missile fired straight through the big red cross on its roof — leaving not even a scorch mark.

But worst is that even now that this hoax has been exposed, none of the countless writers and commentators who fell for it have admitted to passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists.

It is this refusal to admit that suggests there was an agenda, after all, to so much of the hysterical reporting of the war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah.

No wonder Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer damned that coverage at a conference in Brisbane this week of Australian newspaper publishers: “What concerns me greatly is the evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon.”

Downer could have picked half a dozen examples of that dishonesty — or of incompetence married to a bias. But few are as good as the Case of the Holey Ambulance.