My Daily Journal column today over at CJO is about what I call ?government by executive summary.? One of the examples is the recent flawed reporting about a study of Iraqi documents and what they reveal of Saddam Hussein’s links to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian newspaper, has been reading the study, too, and chimes in with a piece that coins a new word. Here’s an excerpt:

We get too little real journalism about these subjects and too much
“churnalism”, in which a single sometimes misleading wire report is
repeated by thousands of commentators while nobody bothers to read the
source document.

The world was misled about this report because of the focus on one
single sentence of the report, which said: “This study found no smoking
gun (that is, a direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and
al-Qa’ida.”

However, the report does portray a vast network of Iraqi support for
terrorist organisations that includes numerous groups the report
identifies as “part of al-Qa’ida”. The misleading and declaratory
sentence presumably refers only to Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’ida
central itself. For example, the report states: “Captured documents
reveal that the regime (of Saddam) was willing to co-opt or support
organisations it knew to be part of al-Qa’ida, as long as that
organisation’s near-term goals supported Saddam’s long-term vision.”
This included, for example, Saddam providing financial support for
Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy.

Acknowledging this support, but saying there’s no smoking gun
directly to al-Qa’ida itself, means the report is taking an incredibly
restrictive and precise view of al-Qa’ida.

But in any event this report is not claiming, as wrongly reported in
the wires, that there was no link with al-Qa’ida, merely that it found
no absolute smoking gun in the translated documents.