What is perhaps most striking about the tussle between Newsweek and its critics is how similarly the two sides operate in the way they treat the implications that are proper to draw from bare facts. There’s something to what critics like Thomas Sowell say about Newsweek and other minions of the fabled MSM. As Sowell put it in a column:
"Someone referred to the story about George Bush’s National Guard service as ‘too good to check.’ In other words, it fit their vision so well, and scored a point that they wanted to score against President Bush, that it hardly seemed worthwhile to check out the facts.
"That is almost certainly what happened with the story about Americans flushing the Koran down the toilet at the Guantanamo prison. It seems unlikely that Newsweek simply made up the story out of whole cloth. But, once they heard it, it was ‘too good to check.’"
That overstates the case just a bit, which leads us to how most of Newsweek‘s critics do pretty much the same thing. They take a mistake – admittedly one that might seem to fit a pattern – and instantly make it evidence of a pervasive, "basic media mistrust of the military," as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it.
Since the perception that the mistake arose from an inherent bias "fit their vision so well," the story of pervasive media bias became "too good to check." Almost every conservative columnist immediately compared Newsweekgate to Rathergate and went on to draw the larger lesson that liberal MSM bias is just a terrible thing that harms the interests of the United States, which, is, a bad thing because, there’s a war on, after all.
Easy Conclusions
Thus it’s easy for conservative pundits to assume that it was bias rather than sloppiness that led to Newsweek running the "Periscope" item suggesting that a government report would confirm allegations that have been put forward mostly by former detainees for several years that U.S. guards at Guantanamo flushed a Koran down the toilet in the presence of Muslim detainees (you can’t call them prisoners because the U.S. doesn’t grant them the protections of the Geneva Accord on Prisoners of War).
The more one looks into the situation, however, the more likely it seems that Michael Isikoff committed the all-too-common mistake of getting too cozy with a source who had proven reliable in the past. Almost all journalists make that mistake at some time in their lives. It’s a mistake that’s even easier in the hothouse atmosphere of the Imperial City, where all too many stories of national significance are based almost solely on comments or information from anonymous sources.
I wouldn’t want to ban the use of anonymous sources altogether. Occasionally an anonymous source can be the only way to begin digging into a genuine scandal. But in Washington, day-to-day stories about minor shifts in policy or legislative maneuvering commonly use anonymous sources. This can sometimes cloak a relationship between reporter and source that borders on being corrupt, or can be used by a source to promote a personal, bureaucratic, or partisan agenda that the reporter may or may not be aware of.
In almost all cases, heavy reliance on anonymous sources is a disservice to the reader. I know that figuring out who Bob Woodward’s or Michael Isikoff’s sources really are, which can often be inferred if you know various players well enough, is a popular parlor game among the cognoscenti in Washington. Although some writers drop in hints, however, most ordinary readers have to guess or never know what kind of axes a source might be grinding, or whether the reporter is a witting (usually) or unwitting accomplice in the political game being played.
I know from experience that people in Washington will often tell a reporter this has to be "on background" or "you can’t use my name," and in some cases there may be semi-legitimate reasons – like an elected boss or Cabinet-level boss who gets antsy if an aide’s name appears in the paper rather than his or hers. But most of the time you can get around that. Often enough, simply saying that you won’t talk to somebody strictly "on background," which you can do especially if you already have a pretty good idea of what he or she is going to say, is enough to get the rules of the conversation changed.
Nobody who works for a media outlet can do all the stories that seem interesting, and it’s all too easy to fall into easy patterns. It seems likely that this, sad as it is, is what happened with Michael Isikoff. I’m not ruling out the kind of predilection Tom Sowell discussed, but the answer in this case seems to be more sloppiness and bias.
This impression is reinforced by the fact that Isikoff did much of the reporting that brought Bill Clinton’s Monica affair into the open – although it’s worth noting that Web pioneer Matt Drudge helped to nudge the story, which seemed to have been stuck in some kind of editorial-approval limbo, along. But whatever his politics – and considering that it’s Newsweek, I’d be surprised if they were anything resembling conservative – Michael Isikoff has gone after stories that have embarrassed people in both parties.
None of this excuses the sloppiness. But it makes it a little more difficult to make the case that pervasive liberal bias is the major explanation. Yet conservative pundit after pundit after pundit jumped to that conclusion immediately, before checking out all the background, because it fit the story they wanted to believe and tell – pretty much the same thing they accused Michael Isikoff and Newsweek of doing.
Why the Reaction?
The more interesting question, to which I don’t have an answer just yet, is why this particular item created such a ruckus. Of course, the ruckus didn’t begin until 11 or more days after the item was published, which is interesting in itself.
But this was hardly the first time the possibility of desecration of the Koran by American guards in prisoner camps has been raised. This New York Times piece wrote of a high-level military investigation that "concluded that several prisoners were mistreated or humiliated, perhaps illegally," and hinted that offensive treatment of the Koran might have been involved. A former Gitmo detainee gave an interview to the UK Mirror about a year ago that alleged punishment beatings, "psychological torture," the smearing on detainees of menstrual blood (taboo for devout Muslims and shocking for almost anybody), and deliberately kicking a Koran.
The Washington Post did a piece in 2003 that told of prisoners being released from an Afghan prison who "complained that American soldiers insulted Islam by sitting on the Koran or dumping their sacred text into a toilet to taint them."
Now it could be the case that almost all these previous stories were based entirely on testimony from former detainees, which by its nature could not be corroborated independently and was told by people who might have an incentive at least to exaggerate if not make up stories. The Newsweek item, however, talked of an upcoming official U.S. government report that would confirm that Koran abuse had, indeed taken place. The source – if the stories are to be believed, and at this stage they are still developing – apparently told the Newsweek reporters he had actually seen the report but later, after the storm broke, either recanted or wasn’t quite sure.
So maybe the Newsweek item looked more definitive than previous items based solely on interviews with or the testimony of former detainees.
It seems more likely, however, that the timing and circumstances were right for this to become the perfect storm. Factional struggles are becoming ever more prominent in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the worst riots took place.
It appears that the article became a handy pretext – and probably did serve to inflame some of the participants and perhaps increase the number who were willing to come out and protest – to intensify protests already planned. Indeed, a "senior Israeli security source" (there’s that easy use of an anonymous source again) told Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily that several of the demonstrations "were planned several months ago, with the magazine article serving as a convenient trigger."
The manufactured indignation of administration spokescritters and knee-jerking conservative pundits about how people were killed – aimed at Newsweek rather than at those who actually staged the riots – seems somewhat misplaced. And in urging that media people really nail down their sources until they’re airtight before reporting anything that might be embarrassing to the administration, they may get more revelations, more credibly sourced, than they had bargained for.
