A couple of funny blog posts from Things Seen and Heard and South of West about western journalists' occasionally rather unfortunate penchant for quoting supposed pirate spokesmen in Somalia without knowing whether they are who they say they are.
We've all done it, of course. But... how difficult is it really to snag a pirate? There are plenty of pirate impostors and there are plenty of fixers willing to take naive reporters for a ride. But there are also plenty of bona fide pirates. Lots of them have mobile phones. Many pirates pass through Nairobi (and have even been responsible for a real estate boom). And given the fact that every Somali seems to know a relative of every other Somali, why wouldn't it be hard to track them down?
I think it has a lot to do with the pirate mystique. If reporters weren't endlessly comparing a bunch of drugged, starving, gun-toting Somali kids to the apocryphal "arrgh"-muttering, eyepatch-wearing, peg-leg-walking buccaneers of old, the notion that it's actually kind of easy to get in touch with them wouldn't seem so far-fetched.
