American Officials Say... (Michael Greenwell)

Here is an abridged version of a story on BBC news about the situation in Yemen. Please pay attention to the parts I have highlighted…

Yemeni forces have arrested three suspected al-Qaeda militants who were wounded in a raid on Monday, security sources say.

They were captured at a hospital north of the capital, Sanaa. AFP news agency says they include Mohammed al-Hanq, a key local al-Qaeda leader.

AFP quoted an unnamed security official saying: “Mohammed al-Hanq and two others who were wounded were captured in a hospital in Amran.”

The agency said the local al-Qaeda leader was thought to be behind the security threats that had prompted the embassy closures.

The British embassy said its public services still remained closed, and that the security situation was being assessed on a daily basis.

The US had reopened its embassy on Tuesday, saying successful counter-terrorism operations by Yemeni forces had addressed a “specific area of concern”.

This was an apparent reference to Monday’s raid some 25 miles (40km) north of Sanaa, in which two other suspected members of al-Qaeda were killed.

The difficulties of travel within Yemen have prevented the BBC from independently verifying details of the reported raid.

But the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, in Sanaa, says he saw military jets flying over the capital on Monday afternoon and into the evening, suggesting some kind of operation was under way.

American intelligence officials say the failed plot to bomb a US-bound jet on 25 December originated in Yemen – where the suspect was allegedly trained by al-Qaeda.

Now, it is not a difficult thing to go through most stories in mainstream news and find exactly this style of reporting so I made and uploaded something from Robert Fisk which brilliantly highlights the problem (1m 34s). I went to a similar talk he gave in Glasgow and it was wonderful. You can find slightly different versions of the same talk all around the web.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxdk31H6bMY 100x100]

Brilliantly put by Fisk I am sure you will agree.

It is however worth saying that in many cases this systemic problem is not the fault of the journalists themselves. As “the NEWS” morphed into the “the NEWS BUSINESS” the standard model was to cut money from the investigative side of reporting and if it was reinvested at all it was reinvested into the presentational side.

Furthermore, even when journalists do have stories despite their limited budgets, real stories are often squashed and never allowed to air – leaving the airwaves full of Michael Jackson type stories.

Nevertheless, what Fisk describes is where we are now.