May 16, 2005

Criticizing the Critcs

Any news junkie knows about Newsweek's Quran desecration story and retraction. For those that don't here's the gist: Newsweek reported that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay put a Quran in a toilet. The report ignited violent demonstrations in some Muslim nations. Even with the retraction the damage has been done. Many Muslims have had their beliefs reinforced that the U.S. is on an anti-Islam crusade. Pro-American president Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan will have even more difficulty tapping down the anti-American fever in his nation.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to Newsweek. On Don Imus' show Howard Fineman tried to explain what happened:

But I'm just trying to meet what the popular understanding of this is. If you run it pass SOUTHCOM and they say no comment, and you run the entire item past a senior person at the Pentagon, and he critiques some other part of the short item, but doesn't critique that, a reasonable reporter like Mike and John Barry, and reasonable editors like the ones at Newsweek, would think that they had it pretty solid. That's what we thought at the time. Now it turns out that our main source now isn't sure whether what he read about investigations at Guantanamo is going to be in that report and it's for that, that we're apologizing.

It would have been better if Michael Isikoff would have been speaking first hand instead of listening to the third hand report from Fineman. Given the current state of sloppy journalism I sympathize. How many stories have we accepted as fact from just one annoynmous source? Too many to count, I'd say. Are MSM critics like Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed blovating simply to score more points? I'm sure both those fine writers have gone off on a story with just one source. Heck, Captain Ed became quite popular in Canada from a source giving him banned court testmony.

What I'm getting at is I wonder if MSM critics are craving another scalp to go along with Dan Rather's and Eason Jordan's. Some tried it with the Wall Street Journal's Brett Stephens earlier this year.

Let me point out a disagreement I have with Captain Ed. Even if the Quran toilet story were true he doesn't think it's news:

This story was just as pointless; what possible news value did a flushed Qu'ran have for the American reader? First, no one bothered to even ask themselves if the story sounded plausible. How would a flushed Qu'ran promote cooperation from a Muslim terrorist? Perhaps threatening to do so would get some positive reaction, but as we've seen in reaction to the story, actually flushing one in front of an Islamist is much more likely to steel themselves against any kind of cooperation. Second, even it did happen, all toilet physics to the contrary, what of it? Does that constitute some sort of Geneva Convention violation? In view of the hand-chopping and rape rooms of Saddam Hussein, maintaining that argument borders on the macabre.

If the story is true then is should be reported. More information is good, not bad. I'd think a weblogger would appreciate that. A free press has a duty to tell the public what is going in the Islamist War. They reported on the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and I hope Captain Ed didn't think that was a bad thing. Such reporting allows the public to examine what it is the government is doing in their name. Such news puts world events and opinion into better, more informed context. That's called self-examination. It must be done or our democratic republic ceases to be either. Does Captain Ed have so little faith in the American public that he fears it can't handle the messy, mean things our troops have to do to win this war?

"More of Newsweek's Blame-the-Pentagon Spin"