Steve Malzberg
Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006

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There I was watching the talk shows and suddenly I thought I must have fallen asleep and started dreaming.

It happened last night on Paula Zahn's show on CNN. Hard evidence in the form of a first-hand account from the "CNN wonder boy" himself, Anderson Cooper, that Hezbollah was using ambulances to stage events for the media.

The discussion had been about the recent revelations of doctored pictures by a Reuters photographer. Joining Zahn was Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," and Chris Johns, editor in chief of National Geographic magazine.

Enter Anderson Cooper live from Israel.

Zahn turned the conversation from doctored photos to restrictions placed on the media by Israeli authorities and by Hezbollah.

Cooper: While on the Hezbollah side it's really interesting. I was in Beirut and they took me on this sort of guided tour of the Hezbollah controlled territories in southern Lebanon that were heavily bombed. They are much cruder; obviously they don't have the experience in this kind of thing. But they clearly want the story on civilian casualties out. That is what they are heavily pushing, to the point where on this tour I was on, they were just making stuff up.

To hear this from the "mainstream" media, on CNN, I thought I was dreaming. But there was more.

Cooper: They had six ambulances lined up in a row and said OK, you know they brought reporters there, they said you can talk to the ambulance drivers, and then one by one they told the ambulances to turn on the sirens and to zoom off. And people taking that picture would be reporting, I guess, the idea that these ambulances were zooming off to treat civilian casualties, when in fact, these ambulances were literally going back and forth down the street just for people to take pictures of them.

I had hoped that a bigger deal would have been made over this information, but Paula ended the segment and moved on saying, "Yet another reminder for all of us that are in this business just about how vigilant we have to be to get it right."

Unfortunately Cooper made no mention of this during his two hours on CNN later in the evening. I wonder if Howard Kurtz had any thoughts? I wonder if he will play back those remarks from Cooper on his show this weekend.

In case you missed Kurt's show last week, he had on the Tom Ricks, Pentagon reporter for The Washington Post who claimed that he had been told by unnamed military analysts that the Israelis were leaving rocket launchers and rockets in place in Lebanon, so that Hezbollah can use them to kill Israeli civilians, and Israel would then gain world sympathy.

Now that's more like what I expect from CNN.

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