This is incredibly sad and sickening: acting on a single source that it did not name, Newsweek published an article that led to riots and death and that it now says was wrong. From Reuters:
Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.
“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,” Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine’s latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.
Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Koran down the toilet.The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.
Sixteen people dead, more than 100 injured. There’s no indication in the Reuters article whether Newsweek is doing anything further — changing policies, investigation what happened, reprimanding reporters or editors.
Words fail me.
UPDATE: More at The New York Times.
TECHNORATI TAGS: NEWSWEEK, FAILURE, JOURNALISM
As in the Rather/Bush fiasco, the actual facts are not in dispute. The argument is simply semantics. Reports of Koran desecration have surfaced in the foreign press for more three years and routinely dismissed by the polite MSP because that’s the way a polite and civilized society based on the indiscriminate slaughter of civilian populations overseas operates.
The official government position does not dispute torture, humiliation, and other inhumane interrogation practices. It simply states that no official government report documented such abuses. I’ve worked for government. I have seen first hand how many truly horrible facts never make it to the final official report, not even the appendices. The same goes for industry.
Shooting the messenger for reporting the reality behind the bullshit is typical in a world with poopadoodle rules. All journalism is simply propoganda influenced by advertising rather than nationalistic jingoism, although the divide is sometimes difficult to see.
Pataphysically yours,
Dr. Faustroll