The Anchoress

Ed Morrissey is steaming about the same thing that really got me going yesterday (you’d have to go allllll the way down to near the bottom of my running thread to find it) that the standards for Newsweek seem to be “prove the negative.” Since the Pentagon didn’ officially DENY this, then it must be true, hey, let’s roll with this story.

If you remember, this was PRECISELY the same way Dan Rather shot himself in the foot. He gave the WH three hours to respond to fake documents they’d never seen before and then, when they did not EXPLICITELY DENY that the documents were real, Rather ran with the story that brought his own career down.

I grieve for the state of the craft of Journalism. These days, it seems journalists are longer out to prove a truth, when an exciting rumor, insufficiently denied and blessedly, anonymously unsourced, can do so much more damage. Asking the White House or the Pentagon to “prove a thing is not so” is the double whammy of bad journalism. It basically allows the press to put out a story from either angle. From the one Newsday and Dan Rather chose to use, or from the other angle, “The Pentagon today officially denied rumors….”

Either way, this is journalism that sullies and sullies, redeemining no one, leaving a trail of catastrophe in its wake (ask someone at CBS if they don’t feel they’ve endured their own tsunami since Mapes and Rather played their dubious hand.)

Actually, it’s not journalism at all.

In Newsweek’s case, Captain Ed says they’re now blaming the Pentagon for their reportage.

[Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker] said that a senior Pentagon official, for reasons that “are still a little mysterious to us,” had declined to comment after Newsweek correspondent John Barry showed him a draft before the item was published and asked, “Is this accurate or not?” Whitaker added that the magazine would have held off had military spokesmen made such a request. That official “lacked detailed knowledge” of the investigative report, Newsweek now says. Whitaker said Pentagon officials raised no objection to the story for 11 days after it was published, until it was translated by some Arab media outlets and led to the rioting.

Hey, you guys didn’t object until someone got killed, so it must be true. Quite a standard, that.

No, it just means that the Pentagon, like much of the blogosphere, read the story and rolled its eyes because we’ve been hearing this unsubstantiated, discredited charge for three years. Until the ME erupted, chances are everyone read that little paragraph about flushing the Koran with glazed over, been-there-done-that, eyes, not catching - until it was too late - that this time Newsweek was making an allegation credited to an American in Government. Anonymous. Nameless. Faceless. How convenient.

Ed says it better:

Quite frankly, this is bullshit. They went to the Pentagon with a wild story about flushed Qu’rans and now they’re surprised when no one knew anything about it? Can you imagine what Newsweek would have written and published had the Pentagon told them to keep quiet about it? They would have turned it into another Abu Ghraib, complete with cover-ups and military censorship. It would have resulted in more silly Senate hearings, and even worse publicity than what Newsweek already generated, with more loss of life — and all for a story that sounded patently false from the very beginning.

The Pentagon does not issue knee-jerk denials for stories on which they have no information, nor should that be their fallback procedure. If Newsweek chooses to run stories about military procedures based on a single anonymous source after hearing from the Pentagon that they have no record of any such activity, that hardly puts the onus on the Pentagon. Whitaker and Newsweek have started a sleight-of-hand attempt that amounts to a claim that the Pentagon should have stopped them before Isikoff and Baker libeled Gitmo personnel, when the use of single anonymous sourcing should have ben enough for Newsweek to spike the story until it was properly confirmed.

Sadly, I suspect that making their targets prove a negative will be the means by which the press will continue to muddly waters and destroy careers.

I don’t remember President Clinton ever having to “prove” that the rumors that floated around him and his administration were untrue.

In fact, as I recall, Newsweek went out of their way, at least once, to do just the opposite, for him. But then…he was their guy. They have standards, you know.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty reports that some foreign press are picking up the “apology” but it hasn’t made it to Turkey, yet.

Meanwhile, I really, really like Roger Kimball’s point, here:

Here’s a question: Why is it that all the stories you read in Time-Newsweek-The New York Times-The Washington Post-Etc. or see on CNN-The BBC-CBS-NBC-Etc., why is it that all their stories about Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, etc., why is it that the presumption, the prejudice, the predisposition never goes the other way? Why is it that their reporters always assume the worst: that we’re doing dirty at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., and are primed to pick up and believe any rumor damaging to the United States? Shakespeare knew that rumor was a “pipe/blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,” not to be trusted. So why do these journalists, trained to sift evidence, to probe sources, to listen beyond the static of rumor: why do they only do so in one direction, so to speak? Yes, I know that’s a self-answering question, at least in part, but it is worth pondering nonetheless. Austin Bay calls the incident at Newsweek “The Press’ Abu Ghraib.” I hope that he is right. “>