« College Students and Hanoi Jane | Main | Galloway Testifies »
May 16, 2005
Newsweek Retracts Story
Newsweek has now retracted a false story that has led to at least 14 deaths. Now it is time for Newsweek to release the name of the source that gave them the false information and to fire the reporters and editors involved in the story's original publication. I think a good sign of repentance for Newsweek would be for it to set up a fund out of the money that would have gone to the fired peoples' salaries and use the money for the widows and orphans Newsweek's story helped to create.
Here is the retraction as reported by Fox News:
Newsweek on Monday retracted a story alleging interrogators at Guantanamo flushed the Koran down a toilet in front of detainees."Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay," editor Mark Whitaker (search) said in statement released Monday evening.
Several bloggers have started saying that "Newsweek lied, people died", which while close is not quite right. Malkin has a good roundup of links under that title. I doubt that Newsweek knowingly printed a false story. Instead I suspect that in their rush to bash the military and Bush they printed a story that they thought might be true even though by most basic journalistic standards it should not have been published. Newsweek never saw the report, the source did not witness the event, there was only one source, the event was questionable in the first place, and the source would not go on record. Given all this and the source's retraction it is time for Newsweek to say who the source was.
TigerHawk thinks Newsweek has blood on its hands from this and that misinformation in war can be deadly and intentional. He argues that they should not have published this story even if it was true.
That they published it on the basis of an anonymous source in the middle of war in which disinformation has figured prominently is almost beyond comprehension. Are the editors completely ignorant of the world? Or do they want to sabotage America's war effort? Is there a third, more benign explanation?
The damage Newsweek has done to the US relationship with Afghanistan based on this falsehood may not be fixed. Austin Bay says this may be the media's equivalent of Abu Ghraib and his comments say it has gotten dangerous for aid workers in Afghanistan. From what I have heard from people I know in that part of the world doing relief work it is more dangerous now in places like Kabul. Jim Geraghty (who lives in Turkey) has a good round up of related quotes and is not happy that he has one more reason to watch his back while he walks down the street.
Posted by Pete at May 16, 2005 05:07 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.petetheelder.com/mt-tb.cgi/532