I just caught this on AMERICAblog.com, and find it extremely weird and indicative of the truly messed up state of affairs we find ourselves in these days.
The story was scooped by John Aravosis, who got a tip that US State Dept press releases lately have been virtual verbatim copies of News and Wire Service reports from days earlier.
Go to the piece and see for yourselves; it literally is word for word, and there's more than a few incidents, like this one, below the fold for the weirdness:
AP: The Iraqi government seized the west Baghdad headquarters of a powerful Sunni Muslim group today, cordoning off the building and accusing the group of supporting al-Qaida, officials said. The Association of Muslim Scholars, a hardline Sunni clerics group with links to insurgents, has its headquarters in the Um al-Qura mosque in the capital's Sunni-dominated Ghazaliyhah neighborhood.
State Dept Status report a week later: The Iraqi government seized the west Baghdad headquarters of a powerful Muslim group November 14, cordoning off the building and accusing the supporting al-Qaida, officials said. The Association of Muslim Scholars, Sunni clerics group with links to insurgents, has its headquarters in the mosque in the capital's Sunni-dominated Ghazaliyhah neighborhood.
Aravosis' take on it:
(the State Dept) plagiarized paragraphs from the major media in the US.
That would be a decent off-the-cuff assumption, based on the chronology of the reports, against the preceding news texts.
But isn't it really more believable that the news orgs are literally acting as government stenographers? I mean, we call them that, but we've been using the term loosely to indicate US media's complicity in the Bush era disasters; isn't it just as likely, given their redundantly proven lack of independence and self-respect, that the US media have actually been copying State Dept cliff notes verfuckinbatim?
Either way, we are so shivved.
____
Oh, and will the courageous Democrats demand to find out what the hell stinks so much in Denmark?
(sound of laughter ringing down the centuries)