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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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 Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 6:34 pm Post subject: Just What Was the Point of That Newsweek Story, Anyway? |
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Excellent article jabbing at the idiocy of the MSM!!!
The title caught my attention because I feel the 'point' of the untrue Newsweek
story was to further defame our military.
Lileks humorously knocks the "supposed" altruism of the Media.
http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks051805.html
| Quote: | Just What Was the Point of That Newsweek Story, Anyway?
BY JAMES LILEKS
May 18, 2005
Did no one at Newsweek consider the difficulty of flushing a book down the toilet? Perhaps the editors assumed American technical ingenuity had developed a commode capable of consuming a Tom Clancy paperback in six seconds. Heck, when they fire that thing up, the suction makes cots in detention cells screech along the floor toward the bars. Was this the toilet for which that famous $700 seat was invented?
Newsweek has retracted its story about the flushed holy book, for all the good it will do.
It's another hit for the Big Old Media, but this time it wasn't bloggers who brought them down. Web sites did not spring into action with technical drawings proving the aperture of pipes at Gitmo was too narrow to accommodate bound volumes. No blogger demolished the source's resume, because he's anonymous. No one even suggested that the Quran in question was mocked up in Microsoft Word. No, this was self-inflicted: an example of people trying to win a race by shooting themselves in the foot.
The alternative media will profit -- not because of their skepticism, necessarily, but because of the questions they asked about Newsweek's judgment and motivation. Put simply: What was served by running the story in the first place?
That's not the point, some would say; news is news, and we cannot censor ourselves if we worry about the reaction. (Unless we're worried about Red America going on a lynching spree, in which case we have to stop showing pictures of people jumping out of the World Trade Center.) Truth is truth and must be told; if there's a Marine out there somewhere holding the Quran with the wrong hand, we have to find him and run the picture. Look, religious sensitivities must be respected. (Unless you're talking about appointments to the federal appellate courts.)
It's not right to ask whose side the media are on. They're on the side of America, of course. But it's a rather perfect version they love -- at least more than the real messy manifestation.
They want the United States to be respected and true to its ideals, and that's why it's important to run a little blurb informing the world that .0000000001 percent of its armed forces put a holy book in the loo to get some information from a detainee. (One wonders, if the detainee had 'fessed up to a plan to bring down the Newsweek headquarters, would the editors have felt relief or regret?)
They want America to be good, which is why the actions of some yahoos on one wacky night in Abu Ghraib must overshadow and define the entirety of the reconstruction effort.
They want the soldiers to win, of course -- of course! But if a Marine shoots an enemy who's already down but may have a suicide belt, this must lead the news. Future enemies will know we play clean, and do the same. "Play clean" for them means using a fresh scimitar for beheading, but it's a start.
Everything makes sense from an office high in Manhattan. It's all quite clear.
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter summed up the Big Media position on Don Imus' show: "I think the larger question that people have to ask is, do they want news organizations out there trying to dig or do they want to take all their information from the government? And we are still, you know, pretty determined, very determined, to be out there digging."
True. Absolutely true. But to what end?
In any case, the story has been retracted. Some corners of the Muslim world might consider whether desecration allegations on the other side of the planet are worth deadly riots. (Cue the "Final Jeopardy" theme.) After all, if destroying the Quran is a problem, one wonders if there would have been riots had FBI investigators found remnants of the hijackers' copies in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, Flight 93 and other atrocities carried out in the book's name.
To which the rioters might ask:
Why would Mossad agents be carrying the Quran?
(James Lileks can be contacted at newhouse@lileks.com) |
I really liked this one:
| Quote: | | They want the soldiers to win, of course -- of course! But if a Marine shoots an enemy who's already down but may have a suicide belt, this must lead the news. Future enemies will know we play clean, and do the same. "Play clean" for them means using a fresh scimitar for beheading, but it's a start. |
Typical loony-left reasoning. If they see we play clean, then they will too.
If only we are nice to them, they will give up their evil intentons to
irradicate all us infidels.
LOL. Give me a break!!
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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I B Squidly
Vice Admiral
Joined: 26 Aug 2004
Posts: 879
Location: Cactus Patch
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| Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 7:35 pm Post subject: |
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I suppose Newsweek will now say the emphasis was misconstrued. The story was not about the the flushed book but the revelation that they aren't using water-saving toilets at Gitmo.
_________________
"KILL ALL THE LAWYERS!"
-Wlm Shakespeare |
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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 8:21 pm Post subject: |
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I guess my kick today is deciphering why journalists have such an
adversarial antagonism toward our own military rather than our enemies.
I read this article yesterday and was reminded of a press conference a few years ago when a reporter asked a
general why the press was not asked to join the Marine's in their combat action.
The journalist reminded the general that this was not the case in WWII.
The general said "Yes, but you folks were on our side, then!"
Sadly, leftwing journalism schools teach that America is Wrong!!
From The Wall Street Journal:
| Quote: | Journalists and the Military
Newsweek's explosive allegation was no "honest mistake."
Tuesday, May 17, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Newsweek deserves credit for coming clean about its dubious Koran desecration story in an attempt to head off further bloodshed. Already its "Periscope" report last week that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the holy book down a toilet has touched off riots throughout the Islamic world, resulting in at least 17 deaths, and added yet another weapon to al Qaeda's recruiting arsenal since many Muslims won't believe the retraction.
Less reassuring, however, is the magazine's contention that the story is a routine error. "There was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards here," said Michael Isikoff, who was one of two reporters behind the story. Certainly we all make mistakes. But if printing such an explosive allegation based on the memory of what a single, anonymous source claims he read is standard Newsweek procedure--no documents were even produced--its readers must wonder about the rest of its content too.
The more consequential question here, it seems to us, is why Newsweek was so ready to believe the story was true. The allegation after all repudiated explicit U.S. and Army policy to treat Muslim detainees with religious respect, including time to pray, honoring dietary preferences and access to the Koran. Yet the magazine readily printed a story suggesting that what our enemies claim about Guantanamo is essentially true. Why?
Our own answer is that this is part of a basic media mistrust of the military that goes back to Vietnam and has shown itself with a vengeance during the Iraq conflict and the war on terror. Long gone are the days when AP's Ernie Pyle--an ace reporter by the standards of any era--could use the pronoun "we" in describing the Allied struggle against the Axis. In its place is a kind of permanent adversary media culture that goes beyond reporting the war news--good or bad as it should--and tends to suspect the worst about the military and American purposes.
The best example of this mentality has been the coverage of Abu Ghraib, which quickly morphed from one disgusting episode into media suspicion of the motives and morals of the entire military chain of command. Certainly the photos of sick behavior on the nightshift by a unit from the Maryland Army Reserve were news. But they were first exposed by the Army itself, through the Taguba investigation that was commissioned months before the photos were leaked.
The press corps nonetheless spent weeks developing a "torture narrative" that has since been thoroughly discredited, both by the independent panel headed by former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger and by every court martial to look at the matter. But rather than acknowledge that perhaps the coverage had been wrong, the media reaction has been to declare the many probes to be part of a wildly improbable cover-up.
As we say, much of this media pose goes back to Vietnam, and the betrayal that the press corps felt about body counts and the "five o'clock follies." Reporters like Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam made their careers by turning into the war's fiercest critics and creating a culture of suspicion that the government always lies. Mr. Sheehan's Vietnam memoir is titled, "A Bright Shining Lie." And for many of today's young reporters it is a kind of moral template.
We aren't saying that reporters shouldn't be skeptical, and they certainly have a duty to report when a war is going badly. Where the press corps goes wrong is in always assuming the worst about military and government motives. Thus U.S. intelligence wasn't merely wrong about Saddam Hussein's WMD, it intentionally "lied" about it to sell an illegitimate war. Thus, too, an antiwar partisan named Joe Wilson with a basically unimportant story about uranium and Niger is hailed as a truth-telling whistle-blower. And reports from Seymour Hersh in late 2001 that the U.S was losing in Afghanistan set off a "quagmire" theme only days before the fall of the Taliban. The readiness of Newsweek to believe a thinly sourced allegation about the Koran at Guantanamo is part of the same mindset.
We have all been reading a great deal lately about both the decline of media credibility, and the decline of both TV news viewership and newspaper circulation. Any other industry looking at such trends would conclude that perhaps there is a connection. Certainly a press corps that wants readers to forgive its own mistakes might start by showing a little more respect and understanding for the men and women who risk their lives to defend the country. |
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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DADESID
Seaman
Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Posts: 157
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| Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 11:56 pm Post subject: |
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Some things just never change.
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"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast."
William Tecumseh Sherman
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Navy wife
Research Director
Joined: 09 Aug 2004
Posts: 353
Location: Arlington, VA & Ft. Worth, TX
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 8:45 pm Post subject: |
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You will all be interested in this interview with Newsweek that I haven't seen in our press! And when you have finished with that, check out the interviews aired on this TV station of captured terrorists. It is so sickening that I can not imagine a human being doing what they did to a fellow human being.
http://www.memritv.org/default.asp
| Quote: |
The following are excerpts from an interview with the �Newsweek� Washington bureau chief Daniel Klaidman, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on May 19, 2005.
Klaidman: Well, first of all, marhaba to you, Hafez. I�m glad to have the opportunity to talk to you and to your audience. We have said on many occasions now, since we published this story more than two weeks ago - we made a mistake. We made an error in this short item, and the error was that we reported a specific act of Koran desecration and furthermore, we reported that this was confirmed by the SouthCom investigators, the US military investigators. We were relying on a source who we had relied on before. He provided us accurate information - a very senior government official - and it turned out that he was wrong, and that he remembered it differently, and so, we did not have the information we needed to put that aspect of the story. We did a lot of research after we realized we might have a problem and we concluded that we made a mistake, and we did what you do in those instances: We came back, we said we made a mistake, we tried to be as transparent as possible, to explain how it happened for our readers and for the public, and so that we learn the lessons from what happened and in the future, we won�t make these kinds of mistakes.
It�s important for me to say that we don�t talk in any great detail about our sources. That is something that is an important part of the reporting process. We have to protect the anonymity of our source because we made an agreement of confidentiality with this person, but when we realized there might be problems with this story, and when the Pentagon raised questions about it, we went back to our source, and we asked could this person be sure of what he told us in the first instance and he said he couldn�t. There were elements of what he had said to us that he could not be sure about: where he read it, if it was in this Southern Command report or in any other investigative documents that were related, whether it had been confirmed, or if it was an allegation. And so, based on the fact that he could not be as precise as he was when we first talked to him and that he could not be sure about some of the information he provided us, and also the denials from the Defense Department, which, of course, we factored in, we concluded that we did not have the information that we needed to make the assertion that we did in this item � that this had happened.
Host: But there is no proof that it did not happen either...
Klaidman: We are neutral on whether any form of Koran desecration took place. There are allegations out there, but the allegations have not been subjected to the kind of scrutiny or legal processes that normally are� you need before you can establish whether they are true and we certainly know that the military has not confirmed any of these allegations, and so what we are saying is we did not have the information we needed to go forward with this story and we are also saying that this specific act of Koran desecration was not confirmed by the US military investigators, and that is what we reported. As to whether these things happened or not, we are, like the rest of the people out there and news organizations - we don�t know. We have heard the allegations, we continue to report, and the US military and other entities are investigating, and as I said, we are neutral on whether any of this ever happened. |
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