Deborah Hastings is a national reporter for the Associated Press. She plays a lot of games with her reporting, and is known to be especially "helpful" to Congressman Henry Waxman and his Democratic staffers on the Blackwater issue.
Hastings has displayed unprofessionalism by manufacturing stories on slow news days just to keep negative coverage of Blackwater in the papers and on the Yahoo and Google News feeds.
As an example, we cite her August 11, 2007 article about Blackwater allegedly shooting on Iraqi civilians. In hindsight after the September 16 incident, the article seems like no big deal. However, nothing had happened in early August that would have merited such a story from a wire service reporter.
The headline, "Contractors in Iraq Accused of Opening Fire on Civilians, Troops," made it sound like someone had raised a new allegation. But the lead paragraph contained no new facts, and offered no information to support the inflammatory headline. (Click on the link for our three-page PDF document that dissects the report. Download how_to_detect_a_fake_news_story.pdf)
The subsequent paragraphs contain recycled information from months and years earlier, with no new developments of any kind. Hastings cites "legal experts and military officials" without naming a single one. Hastings then cites "some military analysts and government officials" who think that American private security contractors should be tried for crimes, but as earlier the sources are anonymous.
Hastings then references "many soldiers" who claim to have witnessed illegal actions by private security contractors, but again does not identify a single one.
Then, in citing a specific example, Hastings refers to a well-publicized incident from 2004 - not news in August, 2007.
The first named official is Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), who never has anything good to say about Blackwater or any of the other private security companies. No news there. Schakowsky then makes an error of fact by calling the security guards "mercenaries," when neither US nor international law considers them as such. Hastings makes no attempt to correct the congresswoman's error.
Hastings then takes a swipe at Blackwater, raising a months-old case that was well reported at the time.
Then Hastings writes about an old jury ruling, then old news from an incident in 2005, then three paragraphs rehashing a report from two years earlier, an unsourced quote from an unknown person making general allegations about private security companies, a recycled vignette from another alleged 2005 incident (none of these involved Blackwater), and a few paragraphs with quotes from active duty military people who resent the private security providers.
That's it. A non-story to keep the issue alive as Waxman and his staff prepared for the upcoming hearings. Yet the non-story was at the top of the Yahoo News feed for more than a day, pushing the issue to the desktops of Yahoo users.
