BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Monday, May 16, 2005
NEWSWEEK AT
MID-PLUNGE. Remember the old joke about the guy who jumps off the
Empire State Building? Halfway down, he's asked how he's doing. "So
far, so good," he replies.
That's where Newsweek is
this morning. Although editor Mark Whitaker has apologized
for sourcing problems in the magazine's item of May 9 alleging that
American guards flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet at
Guantánamo Bay, he has neither retracted the item nor said
that it is false. Whitaker and the reporters who produced the item,
Michael Isikoff and John Barry, are hoping for a miracle. But the
sidewalk is getting closer every nanosecond.
Here
is Howard Kurtz on this fiasco. The New York Times' Katharine
Seelye reports
on the story as well. White House press secretary Scott McClellan,
naturally, is claiming
vindication for the Bush
administration.
Is it possible to offer a bit of
context on the fly? We don't know how this is going to turn out yet,
although I suspect we're going to know a lot more by the end of the
day. There is obviously no excuse for whatever sloppy reporting
Newsweek may have committed, and the fact that 16 people have
died in rioting because of the story obviously looms
large.
But the right-leaning commentary
that Glenn
Reynolds is linking to
strikes me as completely over the top. For instance, here's an
excerpt
from blog written by Dean Esmay:
Furthermore, if we ever
had any doubts that the press is not on our side in the war, that
it is anxious to publish stories of failure and doom and rarely
cares to look at our successes (many of them utterly historic),
well, Michael Isikoff John Barry and the Newsweek editorial
team have finally laid them to rest. You guys are enemy
propagandists. It's just who you are. It's nice that you've at
least stopped pretending.
This is also still further proof
that the notion that "professional" journalists have greater
fact-checking or "checks and balances" than responsible bloggers
is nonsense.
Screw you, Newsweek.
Screw you.
Given how little we actually know
at this point, that's quite a leap.
Moreover, given the level of abuse
that has been credibly reported at Guantánamo - including that
witnessed by government and military officials themselves, as
revealed in documents
obtained by the ACLU - the
notion that the Koran was being desecrated wasn't exactly startling.
Indeed, it seems at least plausible that Newsweek will be
vindicated somehow - or that the Bush administration is taking
advantage of slipshod journalism in order to discredit a story that
may very well be true.
I'm not trying to make any excuses
for anyone. I'm simply pointing out that we still don't know
much.
But the sidewalk looms.
PUBLIC RADIO, TOO. Stephen
Labaton has a disturbing
story in today's New
York Times on efforts by Kenneth Tomlinson, head of the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to go after National Public
Radio.
As Labaton points out, NPR could
easily survive without government money - but its member stations are
dependent on taxpayer largesse, some more than others.
posted at 11:18 AM |
6 comments
|
link
6 Comments:
or that the Bush administration is taking advantage of slipshod journalism in order to discredit a story that may very well be true.
Now why does that sound familiar.
lol..Steve Brady beat me to the punch. This is, as Yogi Berra once proclaimed, deja vu all over again! It's just like the CBS/Dan Rather Bush (lack of service in the) National Guard story that had conservatives popping out of the woodwork to discredit the authenticity of the memo, while sidestepping the fact that what the memo clained still has not been disproven. This Koran mess is the same misdirection play that the Right has been pulling for years. The real shame is that a slim majority of the American public will allow them to get away with it...again!
I guess I'm missing what the hell the ACLU can accomplish at Gitmo other than parrot the same numbing rhetoric we have all heard ad nauseam. Are there not Americans (in America, not Cuba) that need protecting?
Saddest thing I've seen here is that the murderous demonstrators want either a.validation of their previous accusations or b. the truth, whichever works better for them. Say all you want about sinking to their level, but these guys aren't exactly a good advertisement for a transparent process. Sorta speaks to DK's previous comments about objectivity vs. the truth.
For the right wing to charge Michael Isikoff, of all journalists, as having left-wing bias is both a) typical and b) breathtaking. Was it really so long ago that Linda Tripp was affectionately calling him "Issy"?
Dan:
From "ground zero" of the Newsweek hit, some thoughts - first of which is, as the J101 textbook at Northeastern emphasizes, when you're writing, you should consider who the story helps and if the story hurts.
Absolutely the US press should be dogged in pursuit of government malfeasance. But the US press also needs to be cognizant now of its global reach - a massive butterfly effect; an item in a Newsweek roundup becomes bodies on the street in Jallalabad and possible jihad in Mazar-i Sharif.
To steal a phrase: The whole world is watching.
Now, what the press does with that information is up to the editors, but I heard something disturbing in the Newsweek apologia - that the mag hadn't thought about the possible impact of the story. Jeez. If a paper publishes the name and phone number of every accused sex offender and a few get death threats, well, yeah, it's the fault of the yahoos for calling, but shouldn't the paper bear some responsibility?
Newsweek shouted fire in the crowded, hot and already on-edge theater of Afghanistan, and now it's saying, well, maybe it's fire, maybe it's not, we can't be sure any more, sorry, we didn't think about how big a theater it was.
Bugger.
Jim Chiavelli
Kabul
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
