I feel like I've heard about beheaded children for the last 20 years whenever there's an Islamic military group involved in a conflict. But the story is never confirmed by other sources and it just falls quietly off the 24 hour news cycle. Whereas stories with evidence, like the beaten unconscious/dead woman being driven around stick longer because there's some confirmation.

It would obviously help a great deal if Islamic military groups didn't have a truly horrific habit of beheading people at all, but it also doesn't help much if our media is (knowingly or unknowingly) pushing stories that are based on a possible lie.

There are most certainly stories that are based on lies published about any global conflict, this isn't Middle-East-specific, and it's not a condemnation of the individual journalists reporting on live eye-witness accounts, but I dont see many formal retractions and apology from agencies to correct the record on much reporting, live or otherwise.

Given that it eventually fully came out that Iraq's "Weapons of Mass Destruction" were a lie that was used to justify a "pre-emptive strike", and all the media that supported that line at the time, what has changed enough about our media machinery to rely on the accuracy of stories like these now? How can we better ensure that the headlines we read are based on the most-confirmed and accurate information? How many retractions or corrections do media agencies publish on average anyway? Do they just publish an update somewhere and be done with it?

Sorry for the train of thought, this is just something that has been bothering me about conflict-reporting accuracy for a while. I want to make decisions and judgements that are both accurate and cause the least damage, but when history is written by the victor, how can I know the foundations of my judgement are solid? Realistically I don't think I can, and I do not like that concept at all.