Was Kana Faked?

It wouldn't be the first time, nor sadly the last.

The biggest recent story out of the Israeli/Hizbullah conflict was a purported "massacre" of women and children at Kana, that spurred Islamic protests around the globe. Bloggers immediately began to note inconsistencies in the reportage and the Israeli ministry noted a suspicious delay of several hours between the air strike that supposedly cause a building to collapse on innocent civilians and the actual collapse. Arutz Sheva, writing in the Israel National News, lays out the case for believing that the entire episode was staged for public relations purposes. The MSM sources that originally reported the story as a massacre are standing by their accounts. Where does truth lie? Who can say? You believe what you choose to believe.

Read it here.

The larger problem here is one that affects every publicly available source of information -- politicization. The MSM is hopelessly compromised, the blogosphere is even worse. Official government and industry sources are no more reliable than the propagandistic screeds issued by activist groups. The process of peer review that supposedly guarantees the objective quality of scientific and scholarly publications has broken down. There is no universally, or even broadly agreed source of information upon which to base judgments. What we are left with is propaganda. We cannot trust MSM accounts of what happened at Kana any more than we could initial reports out of New Orleans during the Katrina disaster [grossly inaccurate, but still celebrated by the MSM]. Nor can we trust expert opinion on medical, environmental, intelligence, military, or any of the other areas of pressing public concern. All we have is a welter of contention, endless spin, out of which we pick and choose those sources of information that fit our own biases.

The old progressive ideal of a scientifically trained, rigorously objective "community of competence" has been shown to be a chimera, as have all other supposed sources of objective judgment.

What are we to do? Unbounded skepticism leads to solipsistic ignorance.

All we can do is to attempt to make sense of it all, We can read widely, testing our ideas and biases against those of others, hoping to strengthen and improve our perceptions, but our ability to do even that is severely limited. So, in the end, we simply have to rely on the experts.

Fortunately there seem to be experts expounding opinions on every side of every question imaginable, so we can pick and choose those we wish to believe, in the full realization that our choices are biased and based on our personal interests:

In the end, we are left to exclaim, with Randy Newman [in the voice of Mr. Monk]: "I could be wrong..., but I don't think so."

UPDATE:

So it turns out that many Reuters photos were faked. Cost-cutting, unprofessionalism, and ideological bias are rapidly undermining what little credibility the MSM has left.