Al-Ja-Newsweek
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MND ^ | May 19, 2005 | by Dustin Hawkins
If big media were trying to win back their credibility, this was not their week. But thanks to Newsweek’s crack reporting and rigorous fact checking, militant fanatics found the time to declare their 8,456th holy war against the infidels since January. At least there are now more official holy wars than there are holy warriors.
The fairytale lacked the energy and effort that most anti-American hit pieces require. The fabricated story goes like this: A mysterious western interrogator flushed an entire copy of the Qur’an down the toilet, sending Guantanamo detainees into a state of sadness. If true, how bad can it really be? Up until last year these prisoners did not even know what a toilet was.
But the repercussions were grand. Newsweek’s own retraction stated that “angry Afghans took to the streets to protest reports, linked to us, that U.S. interrogators had desecrated the Qur'an while interrogating Muslim terror suspects… which left at least 15 Afghans dead and scores injured.” So, Newsweek publishes the false story, Middle Eastern papers pick up and run with the false story throwing accusations at the US Military, and riots break out as a result of the story. Hey, thanks for the retraction though!
To their credit, at least Al-Ja-Newsweek didn’t hold onto the story for days on end, claiming that though the source was bad, the news was true. A total of one source “confirmed” the original story, though the source later said he could not remember where he had heard about the story.
Other “news” creators have been more imaginative. Dan Rather reported on the long lost National Guard records that mysteriously appeared after decades, and just in time for a Presidential election. Kitty Kelley was at least creative enough to write an entire book of fantastical fiction. And when Kitty goes into full detail about cocaine addictions, you get the sense she knows what she is talking about.
Even if the story had been true it barely enters the category of either news or interesting. If we can’t even torture the people who want to see Americans slaughtered in the streets the least we can do is throw a little psychological discomfort their way. After all, the point is to get information from them. The surest way not to get information from terrorists is to put them up in a 5-Star hotel, send them a public defender, and wait for them to confess wildly to their evilness in the courtroom like during the finale of an episode of Matlock. But thanks for the offer, ACLU.
But the news organization lied, started a riot, and put more innocent American and Middle Eastern lives in danger. But for all the comfort that can be given, Newsweek is going to get to the bottom of this. (Meanwhile, CBS is still searching for George Bush’s pay stubs and OJ is still looking for the killer.)
This incident is just one more stain on Big Media’s dirty sheets, and surely one that won’t slow them down. Journalists will always claim that their job is to report the news, not to choose sides. But something has to give when the “news” always seems to stimulate the enemy and demoralize Americans. Stories such as the Abu Ghraib prison fiasco and the soldier who shot a threatening enemy stay on the front page for weeks. Pleas of the kidnapped are replayed dozens of times on television stations. But Islamo-fascists can burn down a church with small children and gas a small village and it barely makes page 17B.
Treasonous journalists play friendly with the enemy so they don’t wind up on the top of the jihadist hit list. What tells a bigger story is often what the Big Media refuses to report, not what it does report (or fabricate, or imagine, etc.). A few months ago, CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan resigned after stating that American soldiers were purposely targeting journalists in Iraq. If that were the case, we might actually be getting the news from them, fair and balanced.
Dustin Hawkins |
