Chrenkoff

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Outed

Flow sublime to ridiculous...

Following my inadvertent appearance on the "Media Watch" show (which seems to have generated quite a great deal of lively discussion in the comments section), keep on checking the updated post by Tim Blair, including his comments sections, which had me in stitches on several occasions.

With hat tip to Tim, my fellow Australian blogger Gandhi outs me as a part of a sinister US government covert operation, together with Iraq The Model, Little Green Footballs, and Roger L Simon:

The USA has acknowledged that it is running PsyOps in Iraq and it requires little imagination to argue that sites like these are all on the US government payroll.

The evidence? Apparently we all link to each other. Linking between blogs? The evil ingenuity of those baby-eating Zioneocons! But there's more:

Any intelligent observer quickly comes to suspect that there is far more to these sites than meets the eye.

For example, Chrenkoff celebrated his blog's first anniversary with some intriguing nods of thanks to supporters including "Major Tammes at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, our special correspondent and tireless translator Haider Ajina, and friends at CENTCOM, various embassies and ministerial offices, who have to remain nameless."

As we all know, secret operatives are known to publicly thank their covert masters on the occasion of important anniversaries. To some a spymaster extraordinaire, but others might remember Major Tammes as the man who would send me his photos from Afghanistan, part of a sinister Pentagon plot to portray the country as an impoverished, exotic location. As for the others, the "nameless", mentioned in my thanks, far from being on the receiving end of instructions, money, or disinformation, these were all the people who over the year have written to me to thank me for my blogging and tell me that they had found my writings useful in their work. So you've heard it here first: Chrenkoff is the evil mastermind and puppet master behind the US government.

Needless to say, Gandhi will be receiving Pulitzer Prize next year for his fine investigative work (starting with misspelling the name of the Australian columnist who started it all).

Speaking of embarrassing disclosure, read this story by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Eric Stakelbeck about Uday Hussein's Food-for-News program. I'm proud to disclose that I haven't received any oil vouchers from Uday, and no baby seals were killed to produce this blog.

Finally, again in a related area:

An investigation into the sourcing and accuracy of news stories by a freelance journalist at a leading Internet news site concluded that the existence of dozens of people quoted in the articles could not be confirmed.

Wired News, which publishes some articles from Wired magazine, paid for the review of stories by one of its frequent contributors, Michelle Delio, 37, of New York City. It was expected to disclose results late Monday.

The review determined that dozens of people cited in articles by Delio primarily during the past 18 months could not be located, said one person familiar with the report's conclusions. This person said nearly all the people who were cited as sources and who could not be located had common names and occupations and were reported to be living in large metropolitan regions.

Bloggers indeed have a long way to go to live up to the mainstream media's standards.

# posted by Arthur : 5:24 pm