Posted on 05/17/2005 8:00:55 PM PDT by CHARLITE
There's hardly a reporter in the land who, late at night after the presses have rolled on a story that is then too late to change, hasn't had that terrible feeling of doubt that maybe he has gotten something wrong. We have encountered seasoned newspapermen and women who have gone to bed with that feeling every time they've written through long careers. And we're not inclined to get up on our high horse over the error of Michael Isikoff and Newsweek in respect of the magazine's May 9 report that some American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed pages of the Koran down the toilet. We have long had the sense that the press has been awfully quick to cast aspersions on the administration's conduct of an extraordinarily complex and dangerous war. But the magazine has said it was in error, the consequences were unintended, and they are not the only troubling aspect of this affair.
Indeed, the Bush administration has been so quick to condemn this particular press blunder that it's in danger of committing a blunder of its own. "Disrespect for the holy Koran is something the United States will never tolerate," Secretary of State Rice said last week. It seemed only an afterthought when the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, yesterday made a meek plea for religious leaders to refrain from inciting violence, as if this bout of chauvinistic rage were entirely understandable. Why do we assume these riots were inevitable, especially since it follows a pattern? Every spring since the liberation of Kabul, the Taliban has ginned up anti-American crowds in Afghanistan and Pakistan using pretexts real and imagined. This year the pretext was 10 sentence column in Newsweek.
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
According to Matt Drudge (Sun radio), it was not just a story in the magazine, but he got an email hyping the story to the press. The promotion of the story is probably what gave it the high profile and got it picked up worldwide by BBC and Algecira.
Michael Isajackoff should be tried under the Sedition Act of 1917 as a traitor and if convicted shot.
Ok, then.
There's hardly a reporter in the land who, late at night after the presses have rolled on a story that is then too late to change, hasn't had that terrible feeling of doubt that maybe he has gotten something wrong.
When you are wrong most of the time what difference does it make.
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