Some active-duty bloggers have some words about Newsweek’s Quran flushing falsehood. And they ain’t pretty.

UD: Doug Petch has some more to say.

I said yesterday that one reason Newsweek published a falsely very thinly supported “supported” story about Quran flushing is because “institutionally, they wanted to believe the report.”

Today a lead editorial of the Wall Street Journal makes the point more strongly than I:

We aren’t saying that reporters shouldn’t be skeptical, and they certainly have a duty to report when a war is going badly. Where the press corps goes wrong is in always assuming the worst about military and government motives. Thus U.S. intelligence wasn’t merely wrong about Saddam Hussein’s WMD, it intentionally “lied” about it to sell an illegitimate war. Thus, too, an antiwar partisan named Joe Wilson with a basically unimportant story about uranium and Niger is hailed as a truth-telling whistle-blower. And reports from Seymour Hersh in late 2001 that the U.S was losing in Afghanistan set off a “quagmire” theme only days before the fall of the Taliban. The readiness of Newsweek to believe a thinly sourced allegation about the Koran at Guantanamo is part of the same mindset.

My favorite soft drink is Diet Pepsi. Or it used to be. After this outrage, I don’t think Pepsi gets another dime of mine.

Update: I posted a follow-up piece critiquing the speech from a rhetorical angle: “Bias aside it was just a lousy speech.”

Update again: Of course, there’s a problem with boycotts:

if I stopped buying stuff from every company that was run by or contained some idiot who said stuff I disagreed with or that was just plain stupid, I’d be hand-making everything.

There’s a great, comprehensive roundup of the Newsweek scandal over at Winds of Change. Among others, the authors cite Paul Marshal, who asks about Newsweek’s editors,

What planet do these people live on that they are surprised by something so entirely predictable? Anybody with a little knowledge could have told them it was likely that people would die as a result of the article. Remember Salman Rushdie?

The spark was lit not by Imram Khan but by Newsweek itself on May 9 when apparently none of its reporters or editors was aware of the effect such a story would have. There seems to have been nobody there that knew that death is the penalty for desecrating a Koran in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

According to Newsweek, the article in which the Quran-flushing allegation was made was given, pre-publication, to DOD’s public affairs office so that DOD officials could correct inaccuracies. Newsweek says that the article was returned with one inaccuracy noted, but no comment about the flushing allegation.

Newsweek’s editors are being faulted for printing the allegation with reckless disregard for its veracity; WOC says that “At each and every link in that chain [of responsibility], Newsweek failed.”

Yet while no one at DOD could verify whether the flushing story was true - how would a senior DOD official know what a low-level interrogator does day to day? - where is the blogosphere’s outcry over DOD’s blindness to the potential harm the story could have?

I worked in public affairs at Department of the Army in the Pentagon for three years. I did a lot of work with DOD’s public affairs people. I am sjure in my own mind that a sort of tunnel vision set in about reviewing the article, namely, an action officer and/or DOD civilian official was asked to review it for factual accuracy, and did so uncritical of what the “facts” of the story might portend. The review was, by the way, one of about 75 actions (or more) the reviewer would carry out that day.

At bottom, it was Newsweek that published a false story, and they are overwhelmingly responsible for the entire controversy. The magazine spent some time yesterday trying to pass the responsibility off on DOD for failing to red-flag that part of the article. Sorry, no dice. Newsweek didn’t ask DOD to censor the story and didn’t even promise in advance that DOD’s corrections would be honored in publication. This problem is owned by Newsweek all around.

But DOD dropped the ball, too. They also should have foreseen the outcomes the allegation’s publication set loose. After all, there is no one more responsible for safeguarding America’s interests than DOD. I’ve been inside media relations in the Puzzle Palace, including in wartime, and I know that the relationships between the media there and the DOD folks are not nearly as adversarial as outsiders might imagine. There’s a lot of backscratching between the media and public affairs officers. A request to hold off publication until independent verification could be made would probably have at least been seriously considered by Newsweek and maybe accepted.

Update: I say again: all media, including blogs, need to choose their biases carefully.