Greg Mitchell is the left-winger who writes for the lefty blog Huffington Post as well as Editor & Publisher..
Last week Mitchell wrote an inflammatory column about a US soldier who died. Apparently without talking to the family or anyone familiar with the facts of the situation, Mitchell inferred the soldier committed suicide due to stress over service in the Iraq war. My post on his column is here.
And to show Mitchell isn't above exploiting a family's personal tragedy for his own financial gain, Mitchell's no-class column ended with a tackier plug for his new book, which apparently includes a chapter on the medical problems facing returning US soldiers.
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I emailed Greg Mitchell to ask if he had permission from the family to write a national column implying the death was by suicide, but Mitchell didn't respond to my email.
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Mitchell turned to Iraq war media coverage in a column Monday. Mitchell complained about a New York Times piece by Michael Gordon which asserted Hezbollah is training Iraqi militants at a camp near Tehran. Mitchell was upset that the piece was based on unnamed sources, but his main beef seemed to be that the allegations were "at odds" with information published by McClatchy.
As Monday's events played out, it became clear Mitchell's screed against Michael Gordon was premature, because AP reported Monday that Hezbollah is training Iraqi militants at a camp near Tehran. The AP report quoted Col. Donald Bacon, military spokesman in Baghdad. Other outlets, including Reuters, US News and others, published similar reports quoting Bacon and other sources.
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As for Mitchell's favorite news outlet, McClatchy? Good luck finding any coverage of this issue on McClatchy's Iraq web site because it's not there. Or at least I couldn't find it after searching a couple of minutes.
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Monday's scorecard: New York Times 1; Greg Mitchell 0; McClatchy Incomplete.
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