The media bullshit continues

Since the incident in Abbottabad where we are told Osama Bin Laden was shot and killed by US Navy SEALs various news (sic) outlets have, for whatever reason, repeatedly spun the line that Bin Laden’s compound was virtually next door to the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA).  It has happened again today in the Mail on Sunday. Click to enlarge:

Perhaps by suggesting that the compound was ‘just 100 yards’ from the PMA the ‘journalists’ want to exaggerate the Pakistani failure to sniff out Bin Laden right under their noses, or maybe they want to make the US raid sound even more daring because it must have happened within sight of a significant contingent of Pakistani soldiers. Either way it is bullshit. If they are happy to report such basic falsehoods in this way, how can we believe anything they have put in that article?

The web is awash with satellite pictures of the Bin Laden compound, and tools such as Google Maps Distance Calculator make it easy to plot the distance from the compound to the PMA as the crow (or US military helicopter) flies.  Indeed, many bloggers have done that since the incident, so any journo would have no problem checking and reporting the exact distance. But it is clear that Mr or Ms ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ is not interested in accuracy or facts and instead would prefer to spin utter bollocks to their poor readers.

For the record the distance from the Bin Laden compound to the PMA in Abbottabad is not 100 yards as some in the media keep deliberately lying, it is 1,455 metres, or just under one mile.  This of course puts a very different gloss on things.  You can see it from clicking on the image below:

For those poor souls who take their ‘news’ from that rag their belief will be that the compound was just 100 yards away from the academy. And that is how the narrative is made. No matter what we are told by the media we must always take time to establish the facts for ourselves because what we are told is all too often the fruit of spin and deceit.