Posted on 08/06/2007 11:56:16 PM PDT by Checkers
Michael Goldfarb in the Weekly Standard has just broken news on the Weekly Standard that can only result in the firing of, at the minimum, Franklin Foer, editor of the once-respected New Republic. You simply cannot publish anti-military stories, inflammatory and controversial on their face, without subjecting the wild claims to the most strict fact-checking measures possible. Yet Mr. Foer, it now appears, did just that.
Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the husband of a New Republic staffer who previous to his military service posted anti-war material on a weblog, volunteered to recant the stories that were published in The New Republic on the very first day of the military's investigation, according to sources to Goldfarb, the very day that Mr. Foer was simultaenously walking away from one proven Beauchamp lie and doubling down on the rest of the allegations in the three stories. Beauchamp's recant was made under oath.
Now Mr. Foer is in a no-win situation. Either Beauchamp lied under oath to military investigators, making him a liar and destroying his credibility, and taking down the credibility of the editorial staff of the New Republic, and that of the magazine itself.
Or Beauchamp got caught in a lie by military investigators, and when confronted, agreed to recant, making him a liar and destroying his credibility, and taking down the credibility of the editorial staff of the New Republic, and that of the magazine itself.
Whichever is the case, Mr. Foer, as long as he remains editor of TNR, will be the Dan Rather of the political magazine world, a laughing stock caught up in trying to publicly maintain an obvious lie as truth. Mr. Foer complains that the military's investigation process has hampered the magazine's abiltiy to get to the bottom of the scandal and decide for themselves what veracity, if any, there is with Beauchamp's claims, which raise questions that Mr. Foer does not have the standing anymore to be able to answer satisfactorily.
If the magazine didn't get the fact-checking right the first time, how are we to trust that they will get it right the second time, regardless of whether or not the military is "interfering"? Since Beauchamp is now allegedly under oath admitting he fabricated most if not all of his claims, who was in charge of the fact-checking of the story? Who else in Beauchamp's unit corroborated his allegations?
Transparency is the only thing that can save The New Republic, a trait that is not imbued in Franklin Foer as demonstrated by the way he has handled the Beauchamp affair from the beginning. It is time for him to go.
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letters@tnr.com
what a shame....and I so trusted the left to give me the true story
I don't are how good The New Republic's fact checking apparatus was after publication, and if it was interfered with by the military. By then it was too late, anyway. The time to check Scott Thomas Beauchamp's story was before publication.
Our enemies do not care about the retraction. Every anti-American aspect of the initial stories will be accepted as absolute truth by the Muslim World, and any retractions will be ignored as Western manipulations.
The story can not be retracted. The damage to American credibility and the US war effort in Iraq is not repairable. More lives will have to be lost and more time and money spent in order to overcome what Scott Thomas Beauchamp and The New Republic so irresponsibly did.
I dunno. If you believe the Army’s run by idealists concerned only with Truth then the recantation looks good. If you believe it’s run by unprincipled careerists (like Wesley Clark) who’ll say - and bring irresistible pressure on Beauchamp to say - anything that’ll please their political masters, then it looks less good.
On the whole, I think I prefer to disbelieve Beauchamp because the evidence doesn’t support his claims, not because of this recantation.
bump
No one uses common sense now. The pols and press truly think everyone’s stupid... and most of us are. They tell us one thing today, something the opposite tomorrow, are never called on it and propagandize 24/7 via TV/print. Ma and Pa (and the average Joe), believes that crap.
How many stories in all these years have you seen on a new school or hospital built in Afghanistan or Iraq? Can you count the stories on anything good? Why is it the whole globe is attacked by Muslim terror groups and you don’t see it... but we have time for a starlets lack of underwear, DUIs and crap all day... and this is the news?
When anyone read this from the beginning... it should have been an automatic BS call period... common sense.
Maybe there’s not enough mothers and fathers out there... that know when the kid’s going to lie, if they did something, usually before the kid did it. There’s no critical thinking or any thinking for that matter now... shallow.
But we all have common sense. Do we have to start a paper or what? It’s way past Thomas Paine time.
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