My letter to some news outlets:

"Dear Sir or Madam,

I see that the Sydney Morning Herald, Talking Points Memo and the Guardian are all addressing the fact that I, and my citizen journalism community on facebook, has asked for normal journalistic sourcing on the ISIS story. ...
Some of the coverage distorts the nature of my questions.
I am not asserting that the ISIS videos have been staged. No one can yet know anything for sure about the ISIS videos as they have simply not been independently analyzed, according to the news outlets which we have contacted for more information about the verification process. I am simply reporting what we have had confirmed by public editors of several newspapers: the fact that the videos have only one source and have not been independently verified. This second verification is - or used to be -- a normal part of news investigation.
I certainly sincerely apologize if one of my posts was insensitively worded. I have taken that one down.
But that does not mean I don't stand by the need for all journalists to have two independent sources confirming a major story before they release it as confirmed.
More importantly for journalism and for the long haul facing us as a planet as we react to these videos: I am not saying the ISIS beheading videos are not authentic. I am not saying they are not records of terrible atrocities. I am saying that they are not yet independentlyconfirmed by two sources as authentic, which any Journalism School teaches, and the single source for several of them, SITE, which received half a million dollars in government funding in 2004, and which is the only source cited for several, has conflicts of interest that should be disclosed to readers of news outlets.
Why is this even controversial? There are plenty of reasons for the normal vetting process of news to take place here, as in any news story. There could be plenty of reasons that a violent extremist group may wish to manipulate what
it communicates to the rest of the world, and the job of newspapers is independently to verify a news story that is driving massive change -- boots on the ground -- airstrikes -- and most worrying to me, lasting suppression of critical liberties such as the bills that just passed in Australia threatening all journalists there with ten years in prison for national security reporting. I hope, finally, that the nation of my/our request for proper, normal news sourcing is clear.
I will add: a hundred thousand Iraqis and four thousand young and brave American men and women, US soldiers, died terrible deaths -- deaths as awful as any depicted right now in these videos -- because American reporters and editors did not check on a news stream full of assertions that turned out to be straight-out false, about WMD. At that time reporters and editors simply took dictation from government sources. The false story made it into several major respected news outlets, including one of our most august newspapers, New York Times.
And we rushed to war.
We are here again. It is of course terrible to see videos purporting to show assassinations; it is terrible that anyone is assassinated anywhere. But if we don't do our jobs as journalists and citizens and check all the news on the basis of which we are being rushed into war -- and on the basis of which Australia and Britain are being stripped drastically and speedily of historic freedoms, -- then many worse things will happen to children and old people, and to our brave young men and women in that part of the world, than a hundred thousand videos will be able to document. Terrible deaths may be ahead for many innocent people, probably out of camera range, many many multiples of the deaths on the videos I am seeking to double source now, if journalists and editors do not independently verify the news now.
And it will be our fault, as journalists and editors. That is why we should do our job and double source the news.