ISIS’s violent bona fides are not in doubt to anyone paying attention. They’ve targeted religious minorities, beheaded aid workers, sold women into sex slavery and have been all-around devastating for those under their rule. But as America debates the possibility of a full-scale ground invasion of ISIS-controlled territory, it’s important to note that much of the ISIS threat — namely that which targets the West — has been habitually overstated by an uncritical media.
In no particular order, here are the ten most bogus ISIS scare stories over the past year:
1. Female genital mutilation edict – July 2014
Who it fooled: Most major media outlets from Time to Reuters to The Atlantic to the BBC (whose story has since been scrubbed online). Above all, the UN itself.
Why it’s bogus: Actual residents of Mosul and regional experts quickly knew it reeked. The story was subsequently discredited by experts and jouranalists and called a hoax soon after.
2. Church-burning in Mosul – July 2014
Who it fooled: Human Rights Watch, The Atlantic, The Independent, The Times of India
Why it’s bogus: An intrepid archaeologist, Sam Hardy, called BS and thanks to the magic of reverse image Google search and some prodding by yours truly, it was eventually retracted by several outlets and never mentioned again.
3. ISIS in Mexico – October 2014
Who it fooled: Fox News, Judicial Watch, The Inquisitr .
Why it’s bogus: Absurd on its face, the story was quickly and roundly debunked.
4. ISIS recruiting emo British teen – December 2014
Who it fooled: Metro, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph
Why it’s bogus: The person who uploaded the picture admitted on Twitter it was a fake. The media subsequently deemed it a “hoax”.
5. ISIS Caliphate map – July 2014
Who it fooled: ABC News, International Business Times, Breitbart
Why it’s bogus: The original story from ABC News cited a map that had been floating around the Internet for months. To this day, its one and only source is a tweet from a noted white supremacist website Third Position.
io9.com and others eventually deemed it a hoax.
6. ISIS beheads Christian children – Aug 2014
Who it fooled: Originally asserted on CNN by self-proclaimed Iraqi-Christian activist Mark Arabo–a grocery story industry lobbyist whose previous media appearance was on a local San Diego news channel to oppose an increase in minimum wage–this story spread among right-wing and Christian media.
Why it’s bogus: After a fairly thorough inquiry, snopes eventually determined the claim was “inconclusive,” having found no independent evidence it occurred.
7. $425m bank robbery – June 2014
Who it fooled: The Washington Post, International Business Times, Fox News, Mic, Vocativ
Why it’s bogus: The story was based solely on accounts from the former mayor of Mosul and was later found to be uncredible by The Financial Times and, ultimately, US officials themselves.
8. ‘Over 100 Americans have joined ISIS’ – October 2014
Who it fooled: NBC News, Washington Post, Al Jazeera
Why it’s bogus: After the FBI admitted there were only “about a dozen” Americans fighting alongside jihadists in Syria in September 2014, several media outlets continued to report “over 100,” despite the government correcting the record several weeks prior.
9. #AllEyesOnISIS “Twitter storm” – June 2014
Who it fooled: The Daily Mail, McClatchy
Why it’s bogus: Yours truly showed that the “Twitter storm” was simply a reposting of weeks- or months-old tweets by an overzealous ISIS fanboi.
10. ISIS’s ebola terror plot – December 2014
Who it fooled: The Daily Mail, Fox News, Mashable, random right-wing media
Why it’s bogus: “Iraqi media” was the only source for the story, and the Iraqi minister of Health quickly debunked it.
Adam Johnson is a freelance journalist; formerly he was a founder of the hardware startup Brightbox. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc. A version of this post appeared on his blog Citations Needed (2/20/15).
I think it’s misleading to say that these stories “fooled” at least some of the outlets mentioned, especially the more ideologically inclined ones.
They could care less whether they are true or not. As long as they serve their agenda, they’ll be amplified.
That’s Propaganda 101, isn’t it?
It is good to know that ALL the horror tales are not true!
There seems to be no story so fantastic that it can’t find a media outlet that will inflate and spread it. We are trapped in a technological web of talking heads whose audience craves titillation 24/7. There seems no end to fantasy and no beginning of understanding.
The US public never knew or cared about knowing the history of French Indo-China before endorsing war in Vietnam. In the same manner, they continue to exercise their ignorance of world history, geography and economics in accepting, as fact, the most exciting “news” story that day.
And our mass media fill that craving. Daily.
I like how you framed all these in terms of “who it fooled.” As if all these news outlets were simply incompetent in their fact-checking. More likely, they were complicit in spreading the false narrative with the ultimate goal of drumming up public support for the US to start (or continue?) a full scale war in the region.
Thank you so much for putting this together. I’ve been skeptical of all the ISIS fear-mongering since the MSM’s first reports on them.
The truth is sad. But the exaggerations are war-mongering. Big difference!
To those saying I ought not have said “Who it fooled..”, you’re, of course correct. I was being generous.
Adam, awesome job. Your reporting on the bogus ‘foreign fighter’ stats is utterly vital imo (and frighteningly under appreciated). It really feels like wmd/anthrax all over again.
@bnep Thanks! At 8,000 words I’m glad someone appreciates that piece. It was a doozy.
ISIS/ISIL is primarily a political movement to kick the West out of Syria and Iraq then the whole Arabic Middle East. It uses religion to fire up its supporters. That is not unique. When the Netherlanders began their rebellion against Spain they too used religion to fire up their fighters. They also committed atrocities for example when the so-called sea-beggars (Watergeuzen) took the city of Den Briel and murdered all Catholic priests there.
If President Obama had better advisers he would have cited the sacking of Leuven/Louvain by the Christian German army in 1914 as a recent example of Christian crimes. Belgian citizens who left their burning homes were executed in the streets by German soldiers. Yes, yes, I know. Some of these soldiers were atheists or Jews.
This is largely a collection of inconsequential reports about ISIS (unless you seriously think “ISIS recruits emo teen” is a key bit of anti-ISIS propaganda) that were sometimes caveated initially and correctly retracted later by the associated media outlets. Some of them are almost intentionally misleading…why is it notable that one report of church-burning by ISIS may have been an error when it’s a fact that ISIS has destroyed other churches?
Despite the opening nod to balance, the overall tone is that ISIS is no big deal. Ridiculous. The reason incorrect stories about ISIS get any traction is that the verified stories about ISIS are so horrifying that they make the rest seem plausible. Obviously accuracy matters, but the way this article attempts to sell the line that we should disregard reporting about ISIS is ridiculous. It’s like saying we should ignore hysterical propaganda about Jeffrey Dahmer that says he killed 18 people, not just 17.
If “accuracy matters,” why are you complaining that we did a report pointing out inaccuracy?
Phony baloney US of Everything Is Rigged, Illegal (or pending)
The latest story is ISIS destroying art works in Mosul I think.
I even saw video of this on some Arabic news on tv.
Adam. J should move to Raqaa with family and feed us with authentic news. Otherwise he is as BOGUS as his stories.
If “accuracy matters,” why are you complaining that we did a report pointing out inaccuracy?
You think maybe the part of the sentence you ignored answers your question? “Obviously accuracy matters, but the way this article attempts to sell the line that we should disregard reporting about ISIS is ridiculous.“
Looks like “emo British teen” is Jake Bilardi, who’s an actual person (but Australian and not British) who may or may not have just blown himself up in Iraq:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-31845428
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/03/12/jake-bilardi-interview-i-am-regular-soldier-islamic-state
Adam Johnson oversold his case heavily on this, saying “the media” deemed it a “hoax” based on a single Guardian piece titled “Twitter user claims Daily Mail story of white British jihadi is a hoax”–but that wasn’t even the *Guardian* declaring it a hoax, much less “the media” as a whole. And the piece is filled with sleight of hand like that.
Simply put, this article as much propaganda in its way as the stories it criticizes. Accuracy matters for the media, but it matters for Johnson–and FAIR–as well.
@Inconsequential
It’s been three weeks since your first comment and you continue to miss the primary point of Mr. Johnson’s piece: Whatever alternate, diplomatic efforts might be useful for dealing with ISIL, and however ISIL might have been the result of bad decisions by the US, the media are whipping up a war frenzy based on titillation and lies.
You chose to label the author’s acknowledgment of the seriousness of the situation, in the first paragraph of the essay, as “ridiculous.” You wrote “Despite the opening nod to balance, the overall tone is that ISIS is no big deal.” A fair re-reading of that first paragraph would conclude that your criticism is ridiculous. To what “balance” do you refer? Do you suggest that the rest of the piece lauds ISIL? Whatever your agenda might be, you’ve obviously made your decision that ISIL is an issue that precludes caution, reflection and study…before action.
In deciding whether this country should divert billions of dollars and kill hundreds or thousands more people (many, if not most of whom, are guilty only of having been born in the wrong part of the world), we should realize that our previous thoughtless attacks in the region (WMDs anyone?), the disastrous reign of Paul Bremer as US Proconsul (his disbandment of the Iraqi army and the entire civil governmental infrastructure being the primary source for ISIL recruits) and the catastrophe that NATO and the US created in our Libya adventure are the basic reasons for this ongoing horror and were ALL preceded and accompanied by the same kind of reckless media titillation.
Bread and circuses worked for Rome; it’s working here, too. Don’t be too concerned with Mr. Johnson and his critique of the media, I doubt that it will have the slightest effect on the US march of the petrodollar through the rest of the world, or on the media in promoting it like so many carnival barkers.
@steve
> You chose to label the author’s acknowledgment of the seriousness of the situation, in the first paragraph of the essay, as “ridiculous.”
No, I said it’s “ridiculous” to act as though ISIS is no big deal. The rest of your notions about what I think and what decisions I’ve “obviously” made are just as mistaken and/or misguided, so I’ll leave you to them.
“ISIS recruiting emo British teen – December 2014”
In Australia they dont write the teen is British, but Australian. I wonder why….
http://www.news.com.au/national/isis-death-cult-tells-aussie-supporters-how-to-sidestep-government-internet-scrutiny/story-fncynjr2-1227286737767
The boy in ‘ 4. ISIS recruiting emo British teen – December 2014’ is Jake Bilardi , Jihad Jake , Australian kid who blew himself up in Ramadhi
I wish you had more citations.
These appear to be just statements that claim the stories are false.
Help me out, so I can use this post as a tool. Kind regards