Free Republic

happy warrior MARK STEYN Nice Goin’, GuysNewsweek is much easier to flush. To us old Fleet Street hands, Michael Isikoff will always be the guy who lost the Monica scoop. He had the Lewinsky story first, but his bosses at Newsweek killed it at the last minute. They wanted more sources, more corroboration: It’s all very well having presidential DNA on the intern’s cocktail dress, but we really need a second stain on a second dress before it would be responsible to run this thing. If you can’t get a second dress, the Columbia Journalism School Book of Media Ethics...

The recent Dan Rather and Newsweek controversies hardly seem connected. But on closer examination, both incidents symbolize what has gone wrong with traditional news organizations.  The old assumption was that opinion media — such as the National Review, The Nation and The New Republic — offer a slant on current events, but that major news outlets, outside of their designated opinion sections, do not.  This commitment to disinterested reporting — and along with it the public's trust in mainstream media — has been shattered in recent years.  It's easy to see why people no longer feel they can rely on...

So Newsweek prints an uncorroborated allegation about American interrogators flushing Qurans down the toilet in order to get fanatical Muslim prisoners to talk, and there’s rioting and death all over the Muslim world. There are several lessons to be learned from this incident, some trivial, some quite important.  1. The courts have given the news media carte blanche, in the name of the First Amendment – but the media are no better than government at exercising unchecked power. When it’s known that no one can punish you, a certain kind of person stops caring whether he hurts anybody. And such...

With one sentence, Newsweek triggered a series of violent intifadas in countries as remote as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and beyond. That's at least how mainstream media, government officials, and most of the public see it. The truth is more complicated: Islamists had been planning these riots long before this story ever made it into print. True, the short piece by Michael Isikoff and John Barry, which attempted to unveil a new scandal, became the trigger for mass violence led by Islamists across the world. But the jihadists had mobilized for a counteroffensive against the "infidels" long ago. Ironically, these two developments...