Encodage utilisé (INPUT) : UTF-8 Forme recherchée : source _________________________________________________________________________________________________ * Ligne n°75 : My suspicions about official sources * Ligne n°100 : When a body of opinion inside government - or inside the mainstream political process - challenges the official version of events, journalists will present competing analyses. But dissidents from outside the establishment lack the standing and resources to sustain an alternative narrative. Unless they have a leading position in a significant opposition party, anyone who is out of office, even if they were once in office, can be depicted as out-of-touch, deranged and embittered. American journalism's greatest triumph, Watergate, merely proves the point. Deep Throat, without whom the story would have died, turned out to be No 2 at the FBI. * Ligne n°102 : The US press, which critics such as John Lloyd of the Reuters Institute would like our papers to emulate, has the bigger problem. It propagated bigger lies - for example, that Saddam was linked to 9/11 - with greater success and, because it lacks the competitive spur of the UK market, presents a more homogeneous view. To some extent, the US press is a victim of its virtuous insistence on rigour. American journalists have it drummed into them from youth that everything they write must be properly sourced. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, newspapers tend to assume, on most subjects, that official sources are the most "proper" ones. * Ligne n°104 : Even the best British papers have no cause for complacency, however, and unlike the New York Times and Washington Post, they haven't apologised for misleading readers. What was going on at Abu Ghraib, for example? Most Iraqis - and they should know - would call it torture. So would most continental newspapers. But analysis by American academics shows the term was used far less frequently by the British press (including the Guardian) and hardly at all by the US press. In both countries, official sources insisted incidents at Abu Ghraib were "abuses", committed by "rogue elements". None of this would matter so much if the press showed signs of learning lessons. But the official narrative on Iran - that it is striving to acquire nuclear weapons while arming terrorists in Iraq - is as unchallenged now as the narrative about WMDs before the Iraq war. So is the narrative that all violence in Iraq is caused by a combination of al-Qaida, Iranian meddling, sectarian fanaticism and * Ligne n°292 : Peter Wilby: My suspicions about official sources * Ligne n°452 : BBC rejects deal on naming dossier source