Truth and rumour in local Iraq coverage

Another episode of Media Watch, another attack on the standards and ethics of The Australian. But, while the ABC media watchdog's casting of News Limited newspapers in a darker light than Fairfax ones is so routine to be hardly worth noting, the issues raised on Monday go to the heart of professional journalism. Host Liz Jackson's thesis this time was that the treatment of the Douglas Wood story has become a battleground in the media war over Iraq: "Put at its simplest, Murdoch papers support the war, Fairfax papers warn that it's not going well". This is not only putting it at its simplest, but also at its least accurate: in editorials such as this, The Australian supported the campaign to liberate and secure Iraq; however, the number of opinion pieces, news articles and editorials we have published during the past 18 months to indicate "it's not going well" would run into the hundreds. And just to refute Jackson's other claim – that we are involved in an "ideological battle" over Iraq – it is worth remembering that many conservative commentators have opposed the war, and their views have been prominently aired on the Opinion page opposite.

Jackson's principal evidence was that, after Sydney Morning Herald Baghdad correspondent Paul McGeough claimed a raid by Australian soldiers on the compound of a Sunni sheik had delayed Mr Wood's release, "a conga line of News Limited columnists and journalists queued up to bash" McGeough. Jackson left little doubt about where, in her view, the truth stood: "McGeough has his sources in Baghdad, the News Limited team have theirs in Canberra". Rather than queuing up to bash McGeough, our reports properly scrutinised serious accusations about the liberation of an Australian hostage in Iraq – the sort of thing you'd think Media Watch might want to do. Our investigation – based in part on sources in Baghdad – found no evidence the raid on the sheik had prejudiced Mr Wood's release.

Bizarrely, Jackson ignored a far larger controversy surrounding McGeough's reporting from Iraq, which our reports also mentioned. In July, 2004, McGeough sensationally claimed in huge front-page stories in the SMH and Melbourne's The Age, backed by lengthy feature stories, that Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad Allawi had personally executed six suspected insurgents in a Baghdad prison. The story was based on the accounts of two anonymous alleged witnesses. But it hardly registered in the world media. And, in the year since, no evidence to support the claim has emerged. It was dismissed by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post as another of the "urban myths" and "unfounded rumours" that swirl around post-Saddam Baghdad. More curiously, the allegation has hardly been mentioned since in the Fairfax papers. A week after the original yarn, the SMH editorialised that McGeough's claims demanded to be investigated – which is what The Australian has sought to do. Again, while no evidence to support the claim has been found, doubts have emerged.

This was either the biggest scoop of the entire Iraq campaign, or a complete surrender by a major newspaper to a piece of random bazaar scuttlebutt. Is it conceivable that a newspaper such as The New York Times would have left that conundrum hanging in the air? Yet when McGeough was named Australian Journalist of the Year in March – by a panel that stated it had "made no informed assessment" of the Allawi story – the SMH confirmed it "stands by" its report. This matter should surely command the attention of a program such as Media Watch. But, rather than probe the McGeough claims, Media Watch considered it more important to prosecute The Australian's columnist Janet Albrechtsen for identifying a source as the website of The Wall Street Journal rather than the website of the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal. Could this be because Media Watch is ideologically opposed to Albrechsten's support of efforts to remove Saddam Hussein?