DISPATCHES By Hank Kalet The frenzy over Newsweek’s error should be attributed to more than just irresponsibility by the media.
Newsweek used a word this week that no one in this business likes to use: "retraction."
The news magazine withdrew a story it wrote a short blurb in its "Periscope" section that said U.S. military authorities were about to release a report verifying that interrogators at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a Koran "down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees." The story, which ran in the May 9 edition of the magazine, had one source, an unnamed official that the magazine had found credible in the past.
The blurb became the subject of sharp denunciations in Pakistan, touching off rioting in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of at least 15 people.
Newsweek’s error and its reliance on unnamed sources has played out in the major news media as just another example of irresponsibility or ineptitude on the part of journalists and will be fodder for a necessary debate in the industry over when and whether to use unnamed sources for stories.
Newsweek obviously made a significant error, which was compounded by American journalism’s and American culture’s complete ignorance of Islam and its culture.
But there is far more to this story than the journalism angle. The key to the story is not Newsweek’s mistake, but the series of allegations about prisoner abuse at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan allegations that have resulted in court martials of several reservists. That is what allowed a paragraph-long blurb in an American news-weekly to gain traction.
But don’t tell the Bush administration this. Everyone from the president to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan to various high-level military officials has had their say, taking their turns playing media critic at a time when the administration should be looking at its own policies.
An editorial in the Boulder (Colo.) Daily Camera attempts to place the Newsweek scandal in perspective. The magazine’s "harshest critics are denying the obvious," it said Wednesday. "What damaged this country’s image abroad was its own well-documented abuse of detainees in the war on terrorism, not one magazine’s flawed reporting on one element of the abuse."
It took the magazine’s critics to task, reminding readers protestations by the administration are fairly disingenuous.
"(N)o one can pretend any longer that the U.S. military simply would not engage in abuse and torture not after the conviction of several participants in the Abu Ghraib atrocities, at least two dozen deaths attributed to torture, and plain evidence that the White House condones tactics prohibited by the Geneva Conventions when dealing with ‘unlawful combatants.’
"After all that, do Bush administration officials and their allies really believe that a magazine has damaged America’s standing in the world? The Newsweek report could provoke such fierce reaction only because the past actions of the United States had made the allegations credible."
What the administration has managed to do again is use a misstep by a media heavyweight to evade responsibility for its own missteps. Dan Rather and "60 Minutes" rushed a badly flawed report on President Bush’s time in the National Guard, which created a huge media storm and led to an independent review of the botched reporting and a series of resignations. The CBS report was at the focus of the news for weeks, pushing questions about the president’s National Guard service aside, allowing him to escape scrutiny once again.
The same thing is happening here. The focus right now is on Newsweek and not on Abu Ghraib or the allegations being leveled against interrogators. The conservative bloggers and conservatives in Congress are calling for investigations of Newsweek and the leak, but no one seems to have any interest in reviewing the mass of evidence on torture that is out there.
In the end, that may be the greatest tragedy of all.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].

