Busted Flush.(MEDIA WATCH)(media controversy)

OOPS, they did it again. The mainstream media have made another of their honest mistakes that just happen to hurt the Bush administration, or impugn the integrity of the U.S. military, or undermine our foreign policy, or--as in this case--all three.

Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff and John Barry infamously reported that FBI e-mails complaining about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay included a report that a U.S. interrogator had flushed a Koran down the toilet, and that this allegation was confirmed in a forthcoming report by the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom) in Miami, responsible for Gitmo. Both of these claims are false. Anti-U.S. fanatics seized on the report to stir up riots that have left more than a dozen people dead in Pakistan and Afghanistan and destabilized the Karzai government. Newsweek should not be blamed for the violence, but its May 9 "Periscope" item was irresponsible, and telling.

Isikoff maintains that no breach of journalistic ethics occurred. But Newsweek ran an explosive item based on a single source (who has backtracked since). The magazine didn't obtain the relevant text from the SouthCom report or have it read over the phone. It tried to confirm its story with a spokesman for SouthCom who refused comment. It showed the story to a defense official who corrected one assertion unrelated to the Koran incident, and didn't comment on the rest. On this basis, Newsweek ran with it. Worse, the story was written in such a way as to obscure the fact that it was relying on a single source for its most inflammatory allegation. If this represents Newsweek's routine practice, then no one should ever again be so ready to believe a fact in the magazine preceded by that pregnant phrase, "NEWSWEEK has learned ..."

Newsweek's panting to get the Koran incident in the magazine was related to the media's general frenzy over Abu Ghraib. The press loved that story, because they believed that it put the lie to Bush's idealistic foreign policy and exposed the nasty underbelly of the U.S. military. It was the contemporary media's version of My Lai. They obsessed over it, and their conventional wisdom remains that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were the product of orders from on high, ...