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May 16, 2005
Questions for Newsweek
When Dick Thornburgh's report on Rather-gate became public in January, John Hinderaker at Powerline penned a cogent response, one that both praised it as "better than expected" and questioned why it "walks to the precipice, but declines to jump." Today, as Newsweek begins to suffer through its own Rather-gate, there are plenty of distinctions to make between Rather-gate and Newsweek. But Hinderaker's analysis points to the questions Newsweek will have to answer, or have answered for it.
• Was Newsweek’s report “motivated by political bias”? What facts suggest it was or wasn’t? (Is there a Mary Mapes at Newsweek?)
• Are problems with the report “due only to haste and competitive pressure? (As Hinderaker said, “If it wasn't political bias that drove the show's inaccuracies and misleading content, what was it?”)
• For Newsweek, unlike 60 Minutes, there is no “communication and apparent coordination” with a presidential campaign. But, going beyond the “political bias,” what was the amount, or extent, of Democratic involvement? (Hey Democrats: Are we really to assume there was none?)
Questions abound. And will Newsweek cling to a "fake but accurate" defense? Already, Nightline is pitching this idea:
One small item, not a full-blown investigative or cover story, just one small 320-word item inside Newsweek has caused reverberations across the globe. Now, two weeks after that first publication, Newsweek acknowledges errors in a 1,500-word correction, but at least 15 people are dead and many more are injured. It is a story about journalism, but it is also a story about the standing of the United States in the Muslim world.
You have to ask yourself, why did this story take? For many it is easy to explain; it’s because in the minds of the people who have expressed outrage it was so believable. We have heard a continuous trickle of reports from Guantanamo Bay, where some 520 detainees (primarily picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan) remain. There have been stories from former detainees about lack of respect for Islam on the part of guards, and even from a former translator at Guantanamo, Eric Saar, about the sexual humiliation of detainees by female American guards and interrogators. So when Newsweek reported that a U.S. military investigation had found that interrogators had flushed a copy of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, down the toilet, for a lot of people it fit a pattern. Protests ensued and people died. The protests were particularly large in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two allies of the United States in the war on terror. So were the protests opportunistic efforts on the part of the opposition in those countries or do they reflect a real sense of outrage? Probably both.
(H/T: Littlegreenfootballs.)
Posted by bill at May 16, 2005 08:07 PM
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