Stuff you can make up

Some stuff you just can't make up. If I told you that Robert Byrd stood on the floor last week and urged Bill Frist not to Haman-ize the Senate, you'd likely think I was inventing some absurd behavior from the most eccentric guy in all of D.C.

Apparently there are also things you can make up. On May 9th, Newsweek magazine reported that US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba had (among other things) flushed part or all of a copy of the Koran down a toilet in the course of their dealings with Muslim detainees.

The response was, sadly, predictable. 16 people died in riots started in Afghanistan, the US was denounced by the usual suspects in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, and clerics late last week were beginning another call to Jihad. Yet another target for those too willing to believe the worst about US policy.

But what's this!? Newsweek today is saying their story was wrong:

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.

The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.

But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could not be certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.

The White House has come out swinging on this today, and rightly so: "It's puzzling that while Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refused to retract the story," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "I think there's a certain journalistic standard that should be met and in this instance it was not."

McClellan complained that the story was "based on a single anonymous source who could not personally substantiate the allegation that was made."

"The report has had serious consequences," he said. "People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged."

For me, I'm not sure what about this disgusts me most. That Newsweek would run with this without having the wheres/whats and therefore's ironed out (lapse of journalistic standards) or that they are so willing to believe such about the way their country operates that they think it okay to print such an allegation without substantive sourcing.

Both are distasteful, but together? There aren't words for my anger. Actually there are, but they are such as is not responsible to print. Which leads me to another point.

In all the discussions about blogs, blogging and bloggers, has anyone noted how many of our un-edited and non-fact-checked rantings have managed to get people killed or substantively damage the nation's reputation? Perhaps the big-boys are right; perhaps this kind of stuff is the purview of traditional media.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has a similar take:

If the report had come from a source who had the balls to stand by what he said, if the alleged event had been witnessed, if it had been confirmed by independent authorities, I'm not sure what the imperative to report would have been: Why did we need to urgently know this? What public good is served? If it were absolutely true, that might be one matter but...

Given that none of those if's was true -- the informant did not have the balls, the event was not witnessed by a source, the event was not confirmed independently -- and given the knowledge that such a report could only be incendiary, then why report it except to play one of two games:

Show-off -- in which the journalist delights in knowing something no one else knows and wants to tell the world before everyone else does, even if it's not assuredly true.

Gotcha -- in which the reporter think he has exposed something somebody wanted to hide.
An incident such as this should force us to ask what the end result of journalism should be. Is it to expose anything we can expose? Is it to beat the other guy to tell you something you didn't know?

Or is it to tell the truth?

And if you don't know it to be true, is it reporting? If you rely on unnamed sources and unconfirmed reports, is it journalism?

Or as Glenn Reynolds put it, it's exactly what the journalists have been saying bloggers do all along.

[sigh]

UPDATE 2: Newsweek has retracted the story:

Newsweek magazine issued a retraction Monday of a May 9 report on the alleged desecration of the Quran at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.