Just received from Steve Huntley, editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times:

An Apology

A cartoon by Jack Higgins in Tuesday’s Chicago Sun-Times incorporated inaccurate imagery to make a statement about the allegations that U.S. Marines killed Iraqi civilians in Haditha. Jack Higgins and the Sun-Times deeply regret the mistake and apologize to the U.S. servicemen, especially those in the Marine Corps, and to our readers who were understandably offended by the cartoon. Higgins, in doing Web research on the Haditha story, searched the Internet for images. A Yahoo search engine displayed a number of photos, one of which was labeled “IraqBodi…rd.jpg.” Clicking on that image took Higgins to the MSNBC/Newsweek site. On his screen then was the original Yahoo search preview image and under it a Newsweek page with a small image of the magazine’s current cover with the headline “The Haditha Question.” Higgins made the erroneous assumption that the image in the photo preview was a photograph of victims of the killings that unproven allegations say were committed by U.S. Marines. Further scrolling down the page would have produced another image of this photo with a caption that clearly identities the dead as victims of Iraqi insurgents. The caption reads, “Insurgents in Haditha executed 19 Shiite fishermen and National Guardsmen in a sports stadium.” Again, Higgins and the editors of the Sun-Times apologize for this egregious error.

Thanks to all the readers who called attention to the error and contacted the newspaper.

I hope this doesn’t happen again.

***

Readers note the Sun-Times’ note offered a much clearer explanation and apology than the London Times. Here’s the London Times’ note:

[Note: This story originally appeared with a picture of slain Iraqis whose caption erroneously described the scene as being related to the alleged incidents in al-Haditha. The image was in fact from a separate incident in the area in which Iraqi insurgents are believed to have massacred local fishermen. We apologise for the mistake.]

Reader Jonathan P. e-mails:

Mr. Huntley of the Sun-Times appears genuinely to regret the paper’s mistake and to understand its implications. Maybe there’s a sliver of hope for the press.

Reader Michael Y. e-mails:

While it is nice that the Sun-Times has apologized for their “egregious
error”, this is getting pretty old. How many times has the media
consistently made “egregious errors” and then apologized for them? And
I would bet that 90% of their “egregious errors” have negatively
impacted reputation of the U.S. Military specifically and the USA in
general. When was the last time the media was quick to rush to
judgement and made an “egregious” error about terrorists? I’m willing
to bet never. They treat the terrorists with kid gloves, even going so
far as to not call them terrorists after they commit terrorist acts! Or
write articles apologizing or blaming the USA for their terrorism! Yet,
if an American soldier loses his composure and moral compass based on
the terrorists killing children, beheading civilians and then, the last
straw, killing one of his buddies with an IED, there is no sympathetic
article written about how the terrorists are the reason our soldiers are
snapping in combat. This is not to excuse the behavior, but simply to
note the obvious double-standard and rabid anti-US military bias of the
media:

Terrorists are not cold-blooded killers of civilians, they are the
product of American aggression so their killing babies, women and
children is understandable.

The American military members are not moral human beings who sometimes
falter because they are so distraught from the constant evil they see on
a daily basis committed by the terrorists, they are cold-blooded killers
as a result of programming and brainwashing of the evil BusHitler
regime…

The Media Blog:

A certain picture is seeping into the culture and becoming symbolic of what happened at Haditha. Ironically, the picture shows a pile of Iraqi civilians who were murdered by insurgents. I think this picture should be symbolic of something else: the unfortunate tendency of so many in the media to lay all of the Iraqi dead at the feet of the U.S. military, regardless of who actually killed them.

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