Whitaker and Isikoff Stand By Their Rumor

Newsweek’s “apology” gets even more baffling and incomprehensible today as Mark Whitaker takes to the newspapers to clarify his side of the story even more. Unfortunately, he’s not making things better.

His stance is that they will not retract the story but are sorry they didn’t get all the facts correct.

First, we have some quotes in the Washington Post:

“There had been previous reports about the Koran being defiled, but they always seemed to be rumors or allegations made by sources without evidence,” Whitaker said, referring to reporting by British and Russian news agencies and by the Qatar-based satellite network al-Jazeera. The Washington Post, whose parent company owns Newsweek, reported a similar account in March 2003, attributing it to a group of former detainees. “The fact that a knowledgeable source within the U.S. government was telling us the government itself had knowledge of this was newsworthy,” Whitaker said in an interview.

Okay, so instead of “rumors or allegations made by sources without evidence”, which would be a bad thing, Newsweek ran with an allegation made by one source without evidence. Sure, that’s much better, isn’t it?

The problem here is that Whitaker seems genuinely clueless about why so many of us are angry at what they’ve done. He doesn’t get that it’s never good to print an anonymously-given story presented without a shred of evidence to back it up. It’s not as if the Pentagon is waffling any on their part. In a story in the New York Times, Pentagon Spokesman Bryan Whitman said the allegation was “demonstrably false” and General Myers has said that they have found no confirmation in any interrogator’s log that an incident like this ever happend. The closest they’ve been able to find is a detainee’s ripping pages from his copy of the Koran and stuffing them down a toilet in order to stop it up.

What is the story right now? Newsweek’s anonymous source, according to the magazine, believes he saw the incident mentioned, but can’t remember in which report it was mentioned. The Pentagon has categorically denied that it has happened and are putting their faces and reputations behind their denials. Nevertheless, Whitaker is standing by the story, or something:

But Mr. Whitaker said in an interview later: “We’re not retracting anything. We don’t know what the ultimate facts are.”

I’m honestly baffled by this. Whitaker has no clue what has happened. All he has in a person who refuses to put his face or his reputation behind his allegation. On the other hand, he has definite and cetegorical denials on the record from others. Yet he still stands behind the flimsy rumor that has cost at least 12 lives, has caused calls for Americans to be killed, and has led to days of riots.

Michael Isikoff doesn’t quite get it either. From the same NYT article:

“Obviously we all feel horrible about what flowed from this, but it’s important to remember there was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards here,” he said. “We relied on sources we had every reason to trust and gave the Pentagon ample opportunity to comment. . . . We’re going to continue to investigate what remains a very murky situation.”

You know, it’s not obvious to me. If Isikoff really did care about what has happened, he would have given more thuoght to printing the story it he first place. As I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t takea great intelligence to know that there are people out there veryinterested in any piece of anti-American propaganda they can get. Isikoff should have known that this would serve that purpose perfectly. If I, a simple blogger without years of journalistic experience, can figure that out, he should have also.

What rankles me about this quote, though, is the dishonesty and cavalier attitude. Isikoff said he relied on “sources”, yet what we know is that there was only one source. He said he gave the Pentagon every opportunity to comment, but it’s not their responsibility to confirm or deny the story. Moreover, when you read the WaPo story today, you’ll find that the one Pentagon “confirming” source who did comment on the report had no knowledge of the section of the report that was germane to the story. This confirming source corected what he or she could and no more. Isikoff apparently took that as a “no comment” and ran with it. He didn’t do his job, plain and simple, and he’s responsible for what he prints. He was lazy and negligent and he doesn’t understand, even remotely, why anyone would say he was either one. He says that he will continue to investigate. Well, I should hope so. I wold have hoped that he would have invetigated just a bit more before he printed the story. Maybe then we wouldn’t have blood in the streets of Afghanistan.

The more I think about this, the angrier I get. It’s hard for me to come to any conclusion except that Whitaker and his magazine honestly does not care who dies and how badly America is injured, so long as he gets another scoop. If he did care about either, he would have waited. He would have exercised the basic level of journalistic integrity they teach you in Journalism 101 and gotten a positive confirmation on the story before he printed it. If he couldn’t get that confirmation, he should have sent his reporters out to get it. Period. There’s no excuse for what they’ve done, although some are trying hard.

Here’s Avedon, writing on Atrios’ site:

Again, we don’t know if the story was accurate, and Newsweek only said that their source suddenly backed down on confirming that the information came from a particular document (but now claims to have misremembered it from seeing it in some other documents). Note also that Kurtz takes for granted that the riots were caused by the Newsweek story. It is certainly probable that the story inflamed demonstrators, but without the problems with resources, it is doubtful the riots would have occurred at all.

No, we don’t know if the story was accurate, which is exactly why the magazine should never have printed it. Kurtz does not take for granted that the riots were caused by the story, he says so because there is demonstrable proof that it did. Take, for instance, the fact that the highest Sunni Cleric in the world called in “a great crime” or that a group of 300 clerics demanded an investigation within three days of they’d launch a jihad against America (well, another jihad, at least). Watch the news stories ont he riots and see just how many signs and banners refer not to the Afghan economy but to this story. Avedon’s fuzzing the facts more than a little to defend Newsweek.

You get the same sort of thing from Tom Harper (courtesy of The Moderate Voice):

So these protests and riots were all caused by a magazine article?!? These right wing dildos have such a clear grasp of cause and effect, they probably think rain is caused by wet sidewalks.

Well, insofar as the rioters say the riots were caused by the article, then I’d have to go with them over someone who believes that Muslims and Christians are dead equal in their level of outrage.

If the situation were reversed, just imagine — if it’s even possible — the reaction in this country. Just pretend for a minute: Jerry Falwell being felt up by female Moslem prison guards and then having to watch while a Bible gets flushed down the toilet. Can you say Holy War?

Well, we don’t have that, but we do have a story of Christians being arrested by the score in Saudi Arabia and Bibles being used as toilet paper at the Church of the Nativity. So where are those Christian riots? Where were they in Pakistan, which is the home to those 40 Christians? The answer is, to anyone capable of rational thought on the subject, obvious. Christians – choose your religion here – don’t do jihad. We learned better a very long time ago.

We have forgotten, though, that not everyone has moved along the civilization trail. We’ve forgotten, as has Whitaker, Isikoff, and their lefty apologists, what I’ve been pointing out all this week – that it takes very little to spark anti-American violence in a Muslim world that has been trained from birth to expect the worst from us.

This is a very simple thing: Newsweek was negligent and people died. No number of excuses or attempt to divert attention from that elementary fact can erase it or make it disappear. There needs to be an accounting immediately – people need to be fired and Newsweek needs to accept and openly admit their fault here. It’s their bed, they need to lie in it.

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Category: General, Oh, THAT liberal media.