Phil Taylor's papers
|
BACK TO : PROPAGANDA 'OWN GOALS' IN THE GWOT
The Buck Doesn't Stop With Newsweek by M Carlson (on above) 
The Buck Doesn't Stop With Newsweek It's Bush's policies, not a magazine article, that fuel Arab anger. Margaret Carlson May 19, 2005 "I feel terrible." Period. Full stop. So Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker finally said last Monday after a retraction of the magazine's May 1 report, based on an unnamed source, that guards at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down the toilet. In riots that ensued in the Muslim world, there were at least 14 deaths, for which the Bush administration blames Newsweek. Whitaker should have moved faster. When a source, no matter how previously reliable or highly placed, goes south, the news organization is always in the wrong. It shouldn't fall back on any "if such and such happened, then I apologize" constructions of the type perfected by government officials and corporate executives. Claiming that the situation is "murky" and it's still on the story, as Newsweek did when the problem first surfaced, came perilously close to sounding like O.J. protesting that he's still searching for the real killer. This is not one of those endless media navel-gazing controversies - the excessive coverage of Michael Jackson or the runaway bride, for example. Lives were lost, and Newsweek has become a whipping boy for the White House and the Pentagon. This case is far more serious than the recent CBS fracas. In an effort to confirm once and for all the previously published reports that Lt. George W. Bush received preferential treatment in the Texas Air National Guard, Dan Rather relied on documents that were later discredited. By the time the White House finished with him, you'd have thought Rather tried to make a liar out of a war hero with three Purple Hearts and two Silver Stars. Newsweek tripped up in a similar race for a scoop. Earlier, the New York Times reported that British detainees released from Guantanamo claimed that guards would "kick the Koran, throw it in the toilet and generally disrespect it." Newsweek moved the story forward with its unnamed source stating that the Pentagon would conclude in a forthcoming report that U.S. military interrogators had indeed flushed a Koran down the toilet to rattle suspects. OK, so the retraction should have come quicker. But now the administration should stop trying to shift blame for the deadly protests to a magazine. It has yet to explain why the Defense Department passed up the chance to correct the source's assertion when the magazine took the unusual step of submitting the report for review prior to publication. The reporter took silence as confirmation. Wrong in retrospect? Sure. Silence is always ambiguous. But the Pentagon has managed to dodge the inconvenient question of why it didn't raise a red flag when given the opportunity, or at least warn Newsweek of the potentially grave consequences of publishing. The administration is also ignoring the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, who told of a senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan saying that the protests were "not at all tied to the article." That didn't stop the White House from insisting the opposite. "The report had real consequences," spokesman Scott McClellan said. "People have lost their lives." Tuesday, when Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita was asked if, in light of Myers' statement, he still believed that people died because of the erroneous report, he said, "I do, I absolutely do." It's understandable that the administration might want to flush Newsweek down the toilet and pawn off the blame for its own mistakes. How cathartic it must be to have something other than those famous photos from Abu Ghraib to blame for rampant anti-Americanism. How comforting, after Ahmad Chalabi, to have someone other than the CIA or White House publicly burned by a bad source. No one excuses Newsweek. But in its long adventure in the Arab world, the administration has hatched few strategies as hollow as holding a magazine responsible for its own failings. |