The New Republic Fails to Tell World Beauchamp Won’t Defend Stories
Someone tosses The New Republic under the bus:
The DRUDGE REPORT has obtained internal documents from the investigation of THE NEW REPUBLIC’S “Baghdad Diarist”, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private turned war correspondent who reported tales of military malfeasance from the Iraq War front.
The documents appear to expose that once the veracity of Beauchamp’s diaries were called into question, and an Army investigation ensued, THE NEW REPUBLIC has failed to publicly account for publishing slanderous falsehoods about the U.S. military in a time of war.
Of course if TNR had of actually fact-checked Beauchamp’s articles they would have never had someone leak damning transcripts to Drudge.
No sympathy.
Michelle Malkin is having a field day. I don’t think it’s glee so much as amazement at how arrogant TNR is.
Once upon a time, I was a tad jealous of TNR editor Franklin Foer being a younger than me and running an influential think magazine. I wouldn’t want to be him now. Think a fork in him; he’s done.
UPDATE: Interesting. Drudge pulled the story from the front page. And we have this from NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez [via Hot Air]:
An editor there e-mails: “Go to the story and click on the link that he claims is to Beauchamp’s confession. It’s not there. The only Beauchamp document is one were he acknowledged receiving some other memo. Nothing even close to a confession there.” At the moment I can’t access any of the documents that are flagged in that “Developing” story….
Drudge might have gotten snookered.
UPDATE II: TNR isn’t claiming the documents are fake. Jonathan Chait disputes calling them a confession by Beauchamp. Fair enough. From my quick reading of portions of the transcript it sounds like Beauchamp wants to put the whole thing behind him and pretend it never happened. That’s easy for him, but for TNR they have to explain why they didn’t bother informing readers the conversation took place.
UPDATE III: I’ve given up watching Game 1 of the World Series. The only major addition to the story [via Ed Morrissey] is Franklin Foer whining about the Army leaking to Drudge. Like the Beauchamp story, he offers no proof. Foer tries a little bit of spinning that his magazine was asking for some “things” from the Army for months. He doesn’t answer why he kept all of us in the dark about his conversation with Beauchamp.
[…] We have documentation of a conversation that took place between editors of The New Republic and Scott Beauchamp. In those transcripts we know the soldier writer no longer wanted to defend himself. He wanted to put the whole issue of fake Iraq stories behind him and concentrate on his soldiering. […]