Israeli weapons in Libya? Andy Carvin and his Twitter followers debunk sloppy reporting, tweet by tweet

NPR's Andy Carvin has become the go-to-guy on Twitter for evolving, conversational, investigative reporting on breaking news in the mideast—140 characters at a time.

He has published a fascinating item on storify about the process of digging into reports from various news organizations claiming evidence of Israeli munitions being used in Libya.

"My Twitter followers and I investigated the claims and ultimately debunked them," says Andy. "Here's the story of how we did it and the evidence we found along the way."

Andy writes that it all started with this photograph posted on the Facebook page for Al Manara, a popular Libyan expat news service based in the UK.

Headlined "Israeli industry against the Libyan people," the photo shows what some type of mortar shell with what appears to be a Star Of David on it, as well as some form of crescent-like symbol. Al Manara assumed the Star Of David meant it was manufactured by Israel, and claimed as such in the headline.

"Israeli weapons In Libya? How @acarvin and his Twitter followers debunked sloppy journalism" (storify)

• [sirkowski]

  Someone’s got a dark sense of humor.

  We got to design the logo for that flare we gonna sell the arabs.
  - Use that star of David!
  - Oooh, hohoho!

• [GregS]

  This is an outrage, an outrage! The Libyan people demand the right to be killed only by non-Israeli munitions.

• [Anonymous]

  Well, if we have determined it is a flare, I still am curious as to who manufactured it.

• [jpollock]

  There’s not much point debunking something if you don’t pass it back to the news organisation that spawned the story.

  • [Andy Carvin]

    fwiw, we did. Didn’t hear back.

• [Anonymous]

  I can think of about 13,000 better ways to illustrate a flare better than a straight 6 pointed star…

• [tsm_sf]

  Interesting to see folks holding Al-Jazeera to a higher standard than Western journalism.

  The Christian Science Monitor is probably the only news organization I trust to not push an agenda other than Hurting People Is Bad.

• [ocschwar]

  “You can blame a news outlet for choosing their guests, but rebel fighters seem like interesting guests.”

  The rebels are consumers of the news as much as they are makers of the news, and these networks have a duty to check stories and provide the truth, to us and to the rebels. The rebels are wallowing in anti-Jewish paranoia because that is what they’ve been used to all their lives. It is AJA’s duty to help them out of this.

  • [emmdeeaych]

    That it is AJA’s responsibility to debunk the claims of those on whom it reports to calm things down is your opinion.

    It is not a moral obligation. Failing at it makes them a bad news organization, not a force for evil.

    In reality – freedom of the press is achieved by owning the press.

    Can anyone show me where AJ states anything other than “Rebels claim this is happening”? A single story where AJ discounts or discards the source and runs with it as verified truth rather than a claim made by a rebel in the field?

    AJ specifically? Please. Do.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  Oh, God. Mary Poppins is siding with Gaddafi?

• [chawke]

  Anon in reply to ocschwar
  Wrong …. Libya’s Gaddafi was anti Israeli not anti Jewish .. And there are Jews in Libya, one of them being the mother of Gaddafi himself. His aunt was shown on Israeli TV and lives in Israel. You can You Tube it or Google it take your pick
  ——————————————————-

  YEP I NEW IT. THEM JEWS GO WRECK EVERYTHING! SADDAM AND THE I-A-TOLLA WHERE JEWS TO IF I RECALL.

  I RESIDE IN OREGON WHICH IS INFESTED BY MOLD AND BIGFOOTS BOTH OF WHICH ARE JEWISH INVENTIONS. ALSO GUEST WHAT? MICHAEL JACKSON WAS PROGRAMMED BY JEWS TO BE A HITMAN TO TAKE OUT BELOVED LEADERS BUT THAT PRGRAMMING DIDNT TAKE INSTEAD IT MADE HIM DO STUFF TO THEM KIDS AT HIS DUDE RANCH IN NEEDLES IDAHO THE SAME PLACE WHERE HITLER WANTED TO RETIRE AFTER HIM AND THE JEWSISH FOREIGN LEGION INVADED US AND IMPREGNATED OUR WOMEN!

  • [Ugly Canuck]

    Must you roar out your racism so?

    Who gives a damn what religion or race anybody’s parents or relations were, or are?

    In fact, who gives a damn about what religion or race anybody is,or has?

    Why should they?

    These things seem to matter to you – why?

    If Mr. Khawdaf’hi has some so-called “Jewish ancestry”, so f’in what?!

    • [chawke]

      Ugly Canuck – dude – I was being facetious – it was a yoke – I mean Joke, as seen by the all-caps, misspellings, bad grammar and Mel-Gibson-like chain-of-thought. I was mocking the lunatics. Now – late hours and Moses-juice were at work, but c’mon – it was kinda funny, no?

      And by-the-way, I am a Jew. I don’t attend schul (synagogue) regualrly, but the Orthodox schul is the one I don’t attend regularly.

      L’chaim!

    • [Avram / Moderator]

      Well, if Gadaffi has a Jewish grandparent, that means that if things go too badly for him, he could run to Israel and apply for citizenship under the law of Return. It would demonstrate an admirable understanding of the traditional Yiddish concept of chutzpah.

• [Anonymous]

  Illumination round. The star represents the glowing round, not the star of david.

• [mo.b]

  what so strange in the subject. Israel have weapon fabrics, weapons need to get sold otherwise the fabric will be closed, AlQadafi got a good deal for this kind of missiles, he buy them and use them when ever he wants. What I am trying to say is that in War language everything was ok! of course not in Human language and either if it has been in Israel or UK, people are dying in Libya because of that.

• [ocschwar]

  “That it is AJA’s responsibility to debunk the claims of those on whom it reports to calm things down is your opinion.

  It is not a moral obligation. Failing at it makes them a bad news organization, not a force for evil.”

  Anyone can report that a rumor is going around. Anyone calling himself a journalist has an obligation to take things a little further and find out if there is truth to the rumor.

  • [emmdeeaych]

    If they’re going to repeat it all over town, yeah. But AJ didn’t. There are no stories about it that they reported, other than this one guy, claiming it.

    Some OTHER news organizations ran with it, which the timeline pretty clearly states. not AJ.

    I’m not an apologist for them, I just think this is a stupid reason to pillory them, as it is based in faulty logic and apparently willful misunderstanding.

    Enjoy your bonfire.

    • [jacques45]

      There’s more to the article than what first loads – you need to click the “load more” button since storify’s web 2.0 layout sucks – and the full article includes a link to an AJA report claiming that these were Israeli. There’s no talking head, just video of the weapons and a voice-over talking about the different armaments, including the claim that they are Israeli.

      Since you’re not willing to follow the whole article, here’s the link to the video, with subtitles, since it only appeared on AlJazeera Arabic. This isn’t a master cover-up…you’re just not reading the whole thing and assuming that I’m making shit up.

      • [emmdeeaych]

        And the person speaking things like “destroy us” is not an employee of AJA. He is someone being interviewed. If you want to see an apology for this, ask the guy being interviewed.

        Not the network for irresponsibly interviewing misinformed primary sources.

        Certainly not when the video is titled. “Are these prohibited weapons?“.

        TMZ is entertainment, I will give you that. This is like blaming CNN for Jenny McCarthy being wrong about the autism-vaccine connection. Or CNN for being wrong about Obama not being a citizen.

        Can you find me a link to a story where AJ “runs with the story”?

        Running With A Story is quite a different thing than “running one piece about a guy who claims something” under a headline asking “Is this really happening?”

        • [jacques45]

          If CNN were to run a story during their news programming about Autism being caused by vaccines produced by Jenny McCarthy or if they had Orly Taitz on in their newscast, it would be just as irresponsible and I would be just as outraged. That’s not to say their opinion shows are right for putting those asses in front of millions, but those shows are clearly delineated as opinion and not their newscast, and are free to slant things in whichever direction they’d choose. Any true news organisation has a duty to report the facts and correct lies that are told on-air. And this is undoubtedly a lie. As the article notes, no correction was made on-air.

          The title of the video seems to be added on afterwards, not an official title from AJA. Since I don’t speak Arabic and AJE doesn’t have the story, I only have the information provided to me in the linked article. If you have more information, I’d love to see it since the video shown is a short clip and as we’ve seen with O’Keefe, context is everything.

          I found a ynet article, but it wasn’t clear on the context. The only other thing I found was the always unbiased Iranian propaganda mouthpiece saying:

          The opposition forces in the Libyan city of Misratah displayed weapons that they have seized from the forces supporting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Al Jazeera reported Thursday.
          They said that some of the confiscated rockets and bombs had signs imprinted on them, clearly indicating that they are manufactured in Israel.

          I can’t tell if they’re attributing the second part to the rebels or to Al Jazeera.

          I still want to know when anyone in the news organisations who aired the video making these claims admitted that these weren’t Israeli by means of an on-air correction, since it was shown in the article that only a little searching would have turned up the truth. You’re correct, “Running with the story” was not the correct terminology, as that implies they were repeating it.

        • [gravytop]

          You’re obviously right on this, and I think at least some of the commenters finding fault with your criticism must just feel an obligation to reflexively defend Al-Jazeera, since it was so reviled by the despised Bush administration et al.

      • [El Mariachi]

        My bad for missing the “Read More” there — terrible UI, looks like “Read more about the Libyan uprising” or “Read more from this author,” not “Read more of this article on the next page.”

        The video lacks context, so it’s hard to say whether or not it was followed by any debunking/correction/analysis. It probably should have been, but I’m generally inclined to defend Al Jazeera given the amount of frothing wild-eyed attacks on it in and by the U.S. (Not saying you are frothing or wild-eyed. Hyperbolic maybe.)

• [emmdeeaych]

  I find it telling that the rebels would assume that the weapons could be Israeli, but blaming the media for the prejudices of the people gets the goat by the wrong end entirely.

• [Anonymous]

  Unless that ‘flare’ icon is based on some ISO guidelines, it’s quite a poor choice for what it’s supposed to represent.

• [Anonymous]

  That´s what I´d call intentional fallacy.
  To me it was kinda obvious, especially after reading “Illum” & “Para” on the shell that the pictogram shows a flare below a canopy.
  But to be true, there are people who see Jesus on toast or the CIA behind 9/11.
  Star of David nutjobs are just the muslim brand of the same breed.

  • [TheCrawNotTheCraw]

    Speaking of which:

    http://www.boingboing.net/2011/04/02/jesus-cheese-us-appe.html

• [cybergibbons]

  It’s astonishing how long anyone took to get to that conclusion – “ILLUM PARA” is written on the side of the mortar. It also already looks like it has been fired, and any explosive mortar wouldn’t look like that after it has been recovered.

  The symbol on the side is standard, at least on anything in Europe.

  • [Andy Carvin]

    Actually, we knew it was an illumination round very quickly. What took a while longer was digging up enough examples, both modern and historical, to cement our case.

• [Anonymous]

  I am no expert but I see it says ILLUM and PARA.
  These must be Illumination mortars that have a light source suspended from a parachute.

  The graphic symbolizes that for the people who don’t read the latin alphabet.
  It shows a symbolized light source under a symbolized parachute.
  I guess the six pointed star is coincidential and were it a star of david it would be drawn of two triaqngles.

• [Guysmiley]

  Definitely has not been fired. It just was not treated very well. A set time after firing a burst charge goes off ejecting the illumination flare from the body of the round which then floats down on a parachute while burning to provide… illumination.

  But yeah, anyone claiming that symbol is a “Star of David” is seriously clueless. It’s an icon depicting a flare floating on a parachute.

• [jacques45]

  Shame on AlJazeera for not fact checking before running yet another inflammatory story. I expected the unsubstantiated claims from the Iranian and Libyan propaganda mouthpieces (or some of the sloppier US outlets), but why let the truth get in the way of some fun Israel-bashing?

  What would they gain from partnering with Gaddafi? It’s not like whomever takes over when things get sorted out is going to hate Israel any less than the current regime.

  • [El Mariachi]

    You might want to do some fact-checking of your own before casting stones. Or some article-reading. Would summary-reading be too much to ask?

    Almanara != Al Jazeera.

    • [jacques45]

      I’ll match your rude and unenlightened comment with my own. RTFA yourself buddy before you attack me for not reading the article.

      End of story, right? Wrong. Fast forward to March 30, when Al Jazeera Arabic ran this story about a weapons cache that had the same symbols – and once again, attributed them to Israel.

      • [El Mariachi]

        I don’t know where you’re pulling that quote from but it’s not from the linked article as far as I can tell. I can’t read Arabic but a search of english.aljazeera.net didn’t come up with anything about Israeli weapons in Libya.

        • [jacques45]

          Down at the bottom of the page, there’s a link for “Load More”. It expands the story 3 times, the A-J part is in the 2nd/3rd parts.

        • [emmdeeaych]

          And I wish you had read it. If anything this tells me AJA is likely to have done this same research and not run with the story, as it was heresay, easily disproven. If AJA did do that research, and you think they have some duty to run stories that cover Israel’s ass, then you have them confused with FOX.

        • [jacques45]

          I think you’re confused. I read the article, watched the video, and rebuked AJA for running with the story without refuting it. This has nothing to do with “covering Israel’s ass” as you so delicately put it, since as the entirety of the linked article proved, these were not Israeli weapons.

          This is not comparable to Charlie Sheen on TMZ. That “network” is entertainment, not the news. It does not have Mr. Sheen on as a guest to present facts to the audience. It would be similar if this was AJA’s answer to the O’Reilly Factor or an opinion-based show, but as best as I can tell, this was on a news report about how the rebels were being attacked. The video was presented as a fact to the viewer. One can only guess at their motivations for running the story without research.

        • [emmdeeaych]

          and rebuked AJA for running with the story without refuting it.

          I have seen no proof of this, and I have seen proof to the contrary, as given above, by El Mariachi.

          Link me one of these stories or video’s you have seen – that would be convincing.

          Your cranky ass simply telling me that is true != proof, you delicate flower.

  • [emmdeeaych]

    Having followed your back-n-forth, I’d like to clarify something.

    You can blame a news outlet for choosing their guests, but rebel fighters seem like interesting guests. The interesting guests forwarded that theory, and not the network. As El Mariachi has indicated there are no other stories of the sort on the AJA network, as El Mariachi documented.

    You cannot blame a news outlet for what those being covered then say.

    If I may risk an analogy, You’re casting aspersions at TMZ for covering what charlie sheen said when they interviewed him.

    It’s lazy.

  • [Nadreck]

    Possibly but we don’t actually know that a replacement regime would care about Israel one way or another. Libya has no borders and pretty much no interaction with Israel so what exactly is their beef with them? Claims of caring a fig about the Palestinians ring pretty hollow for a country which, like all of their other “Arab Brothers” has never allowed a single Palestinian refugee to immigrate. The phony crusade against Israel has always been a convenient distraction for the local butchers in charge from their internal genocides and corruption but who knows what the Libyans in general think? No one’s ever asked them.

• [ocschwar]

  “TMZ is entertainment, I will give you that. This is like blaming CNN for Jenny McCarthy being wrong about the autism-vaccine connection. Or CNN for being wrong about Obama not being a citizen.”

  See, I DO blame CNN for Jenny McCarthy being wrong about autism and vaccines, and I DO blame them over the doubts on Obama being a citizen, because like most networks, CNN is entirely too ready to present a “balanced” view between truth and bullshit.

  And so I blame AJA for the same thing. Not because they are Moooooooooooooooooslim, but because of false balance. And I have to pity the Lybian rebels because their deluded worldview is going to cost them in lives.

• [Anonymous]

  It’s French. The French mark their ordnance with symbols like that.

• [ocschwar]

  Of all the Arab countries, Lybia has the most viciously anti-Jewish record, and is the one Arab country besides Saudi known to be 100% Jew-free. Ghadaffi is responsible for driving all but one of Lybia’s remaining Jews shortly after taking over, and as rebels have noted when they ransacked one of his homes, he had a big paranoid complex about Jews and collected works of judeophobia. But even before Ghadaffi, Lybia was not a Jew-friendly place, and that same anti-Jewish prejudice, coupled with decades of Stalinist media control, adds up to major paranoia among boths sides of this civil war, as far as Jews are concerned. (Yes, Jews. As far as Lybia is concerned, there is no meaningful distinction to be drawn among Jews.)

  • [Anonymous]

    Wrong …. Libya’s Gaddafi was anti Israeli not anti Jewish .. And there are Jews in Libya, one of them being the mother of Gaddafi himself. His aunt was shown on Israeli TV and lives in Israel. You can You Tube it or Google it take your pick

    • [ocschwar]

      “Wrong …. Libya’s Gaddafi was anti Israeli not anti Jewish .. And there are Jews in Libya, one of them being the mother of Gaddafi himself. His aunt was shown on Israeli TV and lives in Israel. You can You Tube it or Google it take your pick”

      Ghadaffi’s grandmother was a Jewish girl who was abducted and “married” by Ghadaffi’s grandfather. His mother, though a Jew by Jewish law, was raised as a Muslim and lived as one. This charming aspect of Jewish life in Arab countries is a major contributing cause to Jews high-tailing it out to Israel in the 1950′s.

      Ghadaffi himself has a major Jew complex, full of contradictions, and a few years ago he even solicited Lybian Jews to return with a promise of reparations for what they suffered. He did not follow through on his offer, so it came to nothing.

• [devophill]

  TIL Storify is pretty neat.

• [Angstrom]

  The way it doesn’t look like a Star of David is a clue to something I think

• [emilydickinsonridesabmx]

  I’m pretty impressed with the framework that Andy Carvin used to put that together, Storify. Seems like a tool with a lot of potential for tying together crowdsourced stories in this vein in a tidy way. I think some of the best quality journalism is going to be put together in this way more and more in the future. This is a really well done piece. Andy Carvin deserves big props. His Twitter reporting the last few months has been really outtstanding. He’s like a one man journalism wrecking crew!