Dear writers: Please, no more unhelpful stories about how Hezbollah is weakening, collapsing and becoming unpopular | The Mideastwire Blog
▻https://mideastwire.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/dear-writers-please-no-more-unhelpful-stories-about-how-hezbo
Nevertheless, these pieces continue to multiply – sometimes on the same day in different publications! – invariably quoting only enemies of the Party, far away “researchers” that many of us have never heard of and, most often, a guy who claims he is a Hezbollah commander or fighter – or who “knows” the party’s thinking intimately, or knows a guy who knows a guy that sells bananas in the Souther Suburbs … who then goes on to say damaging things about the party.
Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker had a particularly bad piece in 2013 that quoted a “fighter” with the same fake name saying the same thing, on the same day, as a McClatchy piece by David Enders… raising the well known issue here in Beirut of the same journalists relying on a few fixers who say they have access to Hezbollah “members” who will then spill the beans.
▻https://mideastwire.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/dexter-filkins-and-the-new-yorker-did-nyer-fact-check-his-sto
A particularly unhelpful recent piece from vice is here:
▻http://www.vice.com/read/is-beiruts-garbage-crisis-weakening-hezbollah-903