Where Was Press When First Iraq Prison Allegations Arose?:

"Is the press trying to make up for lost time once again? The media is now bursting with accounts of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, but where were they last fall when evidence of wrongdoing started to emerge -- when a public accounting might have halted what turned out to be the worst of the incidents?

'It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source,' says Charles J. Hanley, Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The Associated Press...

He is still amazed that apparently no one else was looking into the allegations, and no major newspaper picked up on his reporting after it appeared. Why? "That's something you'd have to ask editors at major newspapers," he said. "But there does seem to be a very strong prejudice toward investing U.S. official statements with credibility while disregarding statements from almost any other source -- and in this current situation, Iraqi sources."