AP gives up on sourcing stories from Iraq

Flopping Aces looks a recent AP story and finds:

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12 killed, 62 wounded, 2 abducted, and one mosque damaged.

And how do we know all this? Well because the AP said so, thats why! No sourced identified. No pictures taken. Yup, some bang-up reporting going on over there.

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A later version ads a couple of sources that may or may not be with the Iraqi police. Then there is this:

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Ray Robison has uncovered some evidence that Jamil Hussein and even Lt. Thaer Mahmoud may be Al-Jazeera stringers....

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The murky world of the Iraqi stringer gets curiouser. So in Iraq we have two basic types of reporters. Those who report on hearsay from their hotel room and Iraqis who may or may not have real sources for their stories. Which ever you see, they all seem to follow the enemy script. Its chaos out there, at least for the reporting. There is a third, but more rare type of reporter that embeds with the troops and tells what they actually see.

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