Journalism’s black eye du jour-Newsweek vs Pentagon:
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The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ^ | May 19, 2005 | Editorial
Here’s a role reversal for you: The Pentagon was looking for an honest response to an embarrassing, deadly, screw-up, and it was the press that was stonewalling behind non-denial denials and nixonian Modified Limited Hangouts.
Makes you wonder just who’s the watchdog and who’s the dog that needs watching.
An earlier generation will remember Newsweek — one of the breed of increasingly irrelevant newsweeklies that can’t keep up with the immediacy of blogs, webzines, e-mail and 24/7 cable news channels, not to mention that dinosaur, your daily newspaper. So what Newsweek did to garner some buzz was to run a show-stopping little item about American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay desecrating the Koran.
Did you know that American guards flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet at Gitmo? Neither did the Pentagon, after its initial investigation turned up no evidence of that kind of behavior. Neither did Newsweek. It had reported the story based on a single, anonymous source and American journalism’s guiding principle (ever since Vietnam) that the story sounded "shocking but not incredible." Well, so do lots of things, but you don’t print the shocking until you can confirm it’s credible. At least a reputable news outlet doesn’t.
As it turned out, Anonymous Source didn’t stick to the story he/she/it told Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff and John Barry. Despite that, the "news" mag refused to retract its story for a couple of long, bloody days. Its editors preferred to twist slowly in the wind a while for their own, inexplicable reasons. Some of us in this business are just masochists, we guess.
In Journalism 101, or Basic Reporting, Newsweek would rate an F. But in the real world, its unsubstantiated story had consequences a lot more serious than a bad grade. Among them: the most violent anti-American protest in Afghanistan since the Taliban held Kabul. Newsweek’s not-so-minor blunder led to the deaths of at least 17 civilians in those protests/riots. How’d you like to have that on your conscience?
Of course Newsweek can’t be held wholly responsible for the terrorism of a few fanatics in Afghanistan — but it provided the excuse, the cover, the flimsy confirmation of the wildest, most provocative of rumors in the Islamic world: The infidels are desecrating the Koran!
Once all this hit the fan, the least the editors could do was come clean, own up to their mistake, apologize, and retract the damnthing. Which is just what they did — the very least they could.
"We feel terrible," said Mark Whitaker, Newsweek’s editor, who was finally goaded into a retraction late Monday evening. (Maybe he’d only then seen the video of all those wild-eyed protests in Jalalabad and Karachi that his magazine’s screwup had provoked. Our troops are still over there, Mister Editor. Their job is tough enough without having to pay for your incompetence.)
Well, at least Mark Whitaker didn’t issue another hemi-demi-semi apology that really wasn’t. At first, he’d sounded like a flack for, well, the Pentagon — or maybe some U.S. senator trying to worm his way out of responsibility. "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong," he said, "and extend our sympathies to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst." That language sounded merely slick, but Editor Whitaker compounded his error by adding: "We’re not retracting anything. We don’t know for certain what we got wrong." What was this, CBS News?
As with CBS News, it took a public outcry to get Newsweek to do the right thing at last. And retract. But not only did Newsweek have some retractin’ to do, it still has some serious ’splainin’ to do. What possessed Newsweek to run this flimsy story? How did it get in so deep?
We have a theory about that. It’s called Making an Assumption. And you can almost hear Editor Whitaker doing just that: Doesn’t this sound just like something those rotten American guards would do? Hey, look at Abu Ghraib. Yeah, think Abu Ghraib. And did we mention Abu Ghraib? RUN THAT SUCKER!
When it comes to making accusations against GIs, it’s become de rigueur for the more fashionable press to criticize first and explain later, if ever.
Oh, well. We doubt we’ll have the likes of Newsweek to kick around much longer — at least not in their current incarnation as Serious Journalism. What with all those outlets bidding for the attention of the instant-news junkies these days, what’s a newsweekly to do but go tabloid? Indeed, this one already has. If it keeps this up, News-weak can position itself at the checkout lane right next to the Weekly World News — if that’s not being too hard on the News. |
