Sometimes you read the news and you don't know what the hell to think. 

Take the following clip from Associated Press, courtesy of the bus stop organ, Metro (I'm not proud of this) and headlined, "Dozens Dead After Prison Riot."

"...Three policemen guarding the prison were wounded. In one attack, 20 inmates were shot to death when a group of prisoners opened fire on members of a rival gang inside the prison in Mazatlan."

Woah. Now I know Metro is not The Times, but even so -- armed prison inmates? A word of explanation please. What kind of a corrections situation is that? Exactly how would such a prison work -- even in Mexico? 

And what about the three "wounded" guards? Given that the prisoners had firearms, if the guards were shot, why not say so? Or is it possible they were wounded by shivs and other improvised devices common to all prisons? And even if so, what were the guards armed with?

Unless maybe the story was made-up. A lie. Unless the prisoners weren't shooting at each other at all. Unless someone else was doing the shooting.

And yet, it says Associated Press at the bottom -- AP, the oldest news cooperative in North America.

Your source, please?

Everyone knows that news organizations have cut back on foreign bureaus; that thanks to the twin forces of convergence and fragmentation, news media in small markets -- like Metro, like Canada -- increasingly rely on cut-and-paste journalism, just-the-facts-ma'am clips from wire services such as Agence France, Reuters and AP.

What we don't know is, where do the sources get their sources?

It's a terrible thing to contemplate -- the baldfaced lie. We hate to call someone a liar, it's a Canadian thing. Car salesmen have been trading on this for years: "Here is our cost. What do you think would be a reasonable profit for us to make?" We answer as best we can, unable to accept the possibility that he's lying about his cost in the first place. 

Reading the news, however, the question hits even a Canadian, when a supposedly hard news story simply beggars belief.

Speaking of Associated Press, wasn't it AP who fired Christopher Newton in 2002, for "fabricating sources" -- fictitional agencies such as the "Education Alliance" and "People for Civil Rights"?

Who or what is the "source" for this story, the "The Mexican Crime Initiative"?

Of course it's unwise to rely on a single news source -- even Metro. So we turned to the venerable BBC, which had this to add to our understanding:

"...28 inmates were killed and three prison officers injured in a gun battle between gangs at Mazatlan jail in Sinaloa state.

"'A group of prisoners broke through a series of doors using a sledgehammer to destroy the locks and video cameras,' said Josefina Garcia, the chief of Sinaloa police."

O.K., it's a gang thing, and it's 28 victims, not 20. But what about this: "...using a sledgehammer to destroy locks and video cameras?" Locks sure, but video cameras? During an outbreak of armed gang warfare, they spend time smashing video cameras? Why? To eliminate evidence? Evidence of what, one wonders, especially when the news source is the Chief of Police.

Is it possible that someone other than the prisoners eliminated the evidence?

Between the lines

The quest for truth marches to a different drummer -- to Al-Jazeera, from whom we learn that the prisoners possessed "pistols and an assault rifle," and that guards were stabbed as they "tried to stop the violence."

I'm grateful for the weapons specifics, but "stop the violence"?  Somehow I don't buy that phrase -- especially from Al Jazeera -- when used to describe the actions of Mexican guards during a gang war. Unless, of course, someone "stopped the violence" by killing everyone in sight.

Still hungry for answers, we turned to the Vancouver Sun, our paper of record, which featured a story clipped from Reuters:

"Local press reports said around 20 of the inmates at the Mazatlan penitentiary are members of the notorious Los Zetas drug cartel, headed by Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, the most wanted drug trafficker most [sic] by the United States..."

Good to see the Sun keeping up its high standard of proof-reading, but apart from that, the point seems to be that the prisoners were members of a specific, especially nasty gang; it was what Vancouver police like to call a "targeted shooting" -- in order to assuage the public fear of random violence. The detail seems to imply that at least 20 of the dead inmates deserved to get shot, by whomever.

Four separate reports, and I'm still not sure what the hell happened in Mazatlan.

Since the takeover of Canadian news media by ideologically committed corporate owners, Canadians have become accustomed to the fact that one can't simply read news media, one must decode news media -- by separating the ideological spin from the facts.

Now I'm starting to wonder if we have got ourselves into Pravda territory -- where readers must decode not just the spin, but the facts themselves.