Although the story was eventually retracted after due pressure from the Whitehouse and Pentagon, La Shawn Barber says it shouldn’t have been published in the first place. Even if it had been true, she points out, “It’s common sense… …Why would you hurt your own country and risk more deaths just to report this ‘fact?’” Newsweek’s article unquestionably had the potential to be hurtful, as we see from the results. Paul Marshall’s article in National Review questions this apparent ignorance.
There seems to have been nobody there that knew that death is the penalty for desecrating a Koran in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere… In Pakistan in 1997, Shantinagar, a Christian town of some 10,000 people, was burned to the ground after a man there was accused of tearing pages from a Koran.
Merely by looking at past reactions the media should have been able to tell that the allegations they were bringing could be deadly.
Do we need to go back to journalism school?
A rational reaction to the serious dangers the story presented would have been to acquire more sources before publishing it. They didn’t, however, breaking the first rule in journalism according to Mark Tapscott, a veteran in the field.
Journalism 101’s First Rule: If you don’t have two independently verifiable sources for a serious allegation the publication of which could seriously damage or destroy an individual’s reputation, put somebody in of physical danger or place public safety at risk, don’t publish it.
Although Newsweek does claim to have two sources, any amount of scrutiny proves them unreliable. The first was an anonymous government source, a class Tapscott warns about later in his article.
Anonymous sources in government always have agendas, typically self-serving agendas. That means journalists should never rely upon lone anonymous government sources unless they are quoting a document or person they routinely see and can provide additional details, the verification of which would not jeopardize identity.
That alone should have been a red flag to the editors at Newsweek, especially considering that he didn’t have first hand information, merely the memory of something he had read. After the story came out, he couldn’t even be certain where he had seen it, admitting that it might have been a mere investigative draft.
The second source was the Pentagon, an organization that would have made this a solid story, if they had actually be a source. But despite Newsweek’s claims, they really weren’t. According to PressThink, “a Pentagon official who was shown the report and didn’t disconfirm it.” They were used as a source simply because they say it and didn’t immediately say it was incorrect? The Captain’s Quarter’s Blog points out that there wasn’t much the military could say in that situation.
They went to the Pentagon with a wild story about flushed Qu’rans and now they’re surprised when no one knew anything about it? Can you imagine what Newsweek would have written and published had the Pentagon told them to keep quiet about it? They would have turned it into another Abu Ghraib, complete with cover-ups and military censorship. It would have resulted in more silly Senate hearings, and even worse publicity than what Newsweek already generated, with more loss of life—and all for a story that sounded patently false from the very beginning.
Read the manual.
Another point that should have been considered fully before publishing the story is the prisoners’ al-Qaeda training. Journalist Joe Gandelman notes that the al-Qaeda training manual says to make such allegations.
…Newsweek notes in its second report that Al Qaeda operatives are supposed to make allegations that inflame passions: It quoted a U.S. military spokesman, Army Col. Brad Blackner, as saying: “If you read the Al Qaeda training manual, they are trained to make allegations against the infidels..”
If it is a know fact that prisoners are trained to make inflaming accusations, why wasn’t that taken into account?
We know you can do this…
Asking the media to display discretion with stories like this one may seem like a tall order, but Glenn Reynolds insists that it’s possible.
The press is exquisitely sensitive to the risks posed by, say, racial insensitivity in reporting. It’s too bad they’re not so careful with regard to things that might get American troops killed.
It seems they can be discretional, but only with a sort of “selective discretion”, and according to Joe Katzman at Winds of Change, while using their liberal bias as the filter to tune out discretion that they don’t like
The media has proven they can show the kind of responsibility this story demanded. They’ll even go further, and muzzle themselves in ways that impair their ability to report legitimate news – as long as any cause or issue related to the liberal point of view is involved.
Instead of reporting the straight truth and nothing but it, Newsweek let their liberal bias get in the way and reported a story that really wasn’t supportable. And although they are sure to feel the consequences in many ways, from loss of trust to loss in their pocketbooks, the real price wasn’t paid by them, but by more than fifteen people who died because of Newsweek’s story. And that’s a price that simply isn’t acceptable.
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