More Newsweek fallout
Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute offers a roundup of commentary that questions whether the skewering of Newsweek over its Koran story retraction misses other important issues.
Among those he quotes is Brian Montopoli of the Columbia Journalism Review online. "It needs to be said: The media's performance in the wake of Newsweek's blunder has been, from a journalistic standpoint, more disheartening than the original sin," Montopoli wrote.
"Newsweek made a serious error in relying on a single source for its story, and its subsequent report may (or may not) have spurred fatal riots. The magazine subsequently apologized, then retracted the part of the story in question and vowed not to make the error again. In contrast, most of the rest of the media, in reporting the story, has continued to stumble all over itself, making the same mistakes over and over again. And unlike Newsweek, none of them are showing any signs of remorse."
Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, in The New York Times: "This is hardly the first time that the administration has sought to portray the American media as inadequately patriotic.
"They are addressing the mistake, and not the essence of the story. The essence of the story is that the United States has been rather indelicate, to put it mildly, in the way that they have treated prisoners of war."
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Sorry for the double post but my comments belong here.
The massive abuse of the rights and humanity of those illegally held at Guantanamo is already well documented. The Newsweek story mentioned one brief example of desecration of the Koran, which their source would not stand behind, but several other similar stories exist from released prisoners and reports from the Red Cross. The real issue here is not the Newsweek story. The real horror is what goes on every day to those detained at Guantanamo. Today in the New York Times, Tim Golden reported on two more extremely brutal killings of Afghan prisoners held by the US. (see http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?hp&ex=1116648000&en=6cca0512a38427c3&ei=5094&partner=homepage ) The point is that our government denies basic legal and human rights to those detained. Many horrors have happened at Guantanamo and many more will occur behind this wall of almost absolute secrecy. There is no doubt that interrogators in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantanamo have both desecrated the Koran and disgraced and humiliated the followers of Islam. By the way just ask some Muslim Greensboro folks how they were treated by airport security agents shortly after 9/11.
Newsweek is only marginally responsible for the recent violence in Afghanistan. Even US military sources questioned if the Newsweek story was responsible for the Afghan demonstrations. That violence was primarily due to the US War on Terror, US foreign policy and its continued inhumane treatment of Muslim prisoners. If news organizations waited for three confirmed reports from Guantanamo they would never report anything due to the massive wall of secrecy. Confusion and misinformation has always been a part of any Gulag just like back in the old Soviet Union. Now similar confusion comes from our American Gulags in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib or one of our own prisons in Texas or North Carolina. The problem is with the regular abuse of human rights that has escalated rapidly since 9/11. Open the doors to Guantanamo for proper attorney visitation and access and you will be able to hear many first hand accounts of the desecration of the Koran and the massive disrespect for Islam. I wish that the press had spent as much time over the last week reporting on the horrors of Guantanamo as reporting on Newsweek.
Posted on May 21, 2005 12:39 AM
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