[mountaineer]

Guten morgen. It occurs to me that if I had published such an unsubstantiated story (during my reporter days) as Newsweek did, I'd be professionally ruined and quite unemployed. Has anyone at Newsweek fallen on his sword over this? I haven't really been following it.

Speaking of journalistic fraud:

MARY Mapes — the disgraced CBS News producer fired for using phony documents in a pre-election story trashing President Bush — is unrepentant and still claiming her forged National Guard memos are real. Mapes stood behind Dan Rather Monday as he accepted a Peabody Award for their "60 Minutes II" story, "Abuse at Abu Ghraib." Afterward, she told the Broadcasting & Cable trade journal that CBS News never investigated whether the disputed facts behind the National Guard story were, in fact, true. "They made a corporate decision, not a journalistic one," she said. (Page Six)

[BigWaveBetty]

Has anyone at Newsweek fallen on his sword over this?

Nope. It's all the Pentagon's fault for not disavowing the story before they published it.

"They made a corporate decision, not a journalistic one," she said.

Well, duh. Mary Mapes, master of the obvious.

[Timeout]

To my mind, the most egregious element of the Newsweek affair is the ongoing reporting. I've only seen one article that related the KNOWN FACT that al Queda trains its terrorists to make just such allogations for propaganda purposes.

For the life of me, I'll never understand the American press.

[SuziQ]

"They made a corporate decision, not a journalistic one," she said.

It wasn't a corporate decision, it was a partisan political decision.