May
17, 2005
The News About Newsweek
By William
Murchison
What we
all might say in behalf of Dan Rather is that last year's George
Bush/National Guard fable, however shabbily conceived and accomplished,
didn't get anyone killed. No one can say such a thing about Newsweek's
Guantanamo/Koran story, which as of May 16 had gotten at least
17 rioters killed here and there -- while damaging U.S. relations
with the Islamic world in ways unknowable.
All this
on account of one short report in the magazine's "Periscope"
section of May 9 -- a report played up expertly by Islamist agitators;
to wit, that "in an attempt to rattle" terrorism suspects
held at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. interrogators "flushed a Qur'an
[as Newsweek ingratiatingly spelled 'Koran'] down a toilet."
Next thing we knew, students in the Afghan capital of Kabul were
burning an American flag, chanting "Death to America,"
and fanning out to attack international relief agencies and beat
up their staffs. In the town of Khogyani, police fired into a
crowd of hundreds.
At last came
Newsweek's lame apology. The source for the story --
"a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable
about the matter" -- couldn't, um, be sure he/she had been
right after all; therefore, the magazine regretted that "we
got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to
victims of the violence," etc. Well, you win some, you lose
some ...
You sure
do, all of us journalists (however grand and over-advertised)
being humans as well as journalists. We all make mistakes. Some
of us start as early as possible. (Ah, the stories I could tell
from very personal experience!)
Why the fuss,
then, over the Koran story? Well, partly, of course, on account
of the deaths the story caused directly, and the damage it continues
to inflict on the interests of the United States. Can that be
all, though? I think we see in the cold, casual dissection of
American tactics in the terror war the kind of performance we
have come to expect of the U.S. media.
Plenty of
Americans no longer regard the media as automatically, reflexively,
on America's side in foreign contests. Where's the quaint presumption
nowadays that the people who tell the stories, and those who view
or read them, share an interest in their country's success? You
hope for that presumption, and sometimes you find it. Disturbingly
often what you find instead is liberal-tilting American reporters
covering American war efforts with the same critical "detachment"
Al Jazeera might bring to the task.
Alas, America's
reporting establishment, like its academic and cultural establishments,
is hugely, overwhelmingly "blue state." It tends not
to trust those who act in behalf of an administration -- George
W. Bush's -- whose policies they fault almost across the board.
Yes, one
can too easily generalize about these things. There has been first-rate
reporting -- and first-rate, pro-American soldier reporting --
about Iraq. It should be added that our honorable profession,
with its First Amendment commission, is in the news business,
not the business of shilling for whoever happens to run the government
at the moment.
It ill behooves
the media all the same, for its own sake as well as the country's,
to pretend that the American war effort (this includes prisoner
interrogation) is a thing to be covered with fine "impartiality,"
like the NBA playoffs. As we see this week, consequences flow
from different modes of presentation. The nature of the war --
a battle against faceless terrorism instead of enemy armies --
changes the nature of the job. The same for the seeming inexhaustibility
of the present enemy. On and on this enterprise goes; where it
stops, nobody knows.
Factor all
that into the equation and still excuses aren't possible for a
media establishment that displays, through what it tells and what
it omits to tell, its dark suspicions of the policy to which its
country has committed itself.
So Newsweek
"regrets" having gotten "part" of its Guantanamo
story wrong! It's a start, no doubt. But, oh, the cost of it in
terms we haven't begun to tote up.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
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