5/16/2005
No offense to Terry Turner of the Watching Washington blog, but Ron Suskind, former Wall Street Journal reporter, is full of crap! For that matter, so are others in the MSM who think there is some conspiracy theory to “silence the media.”
The problem for liberals is that the media is more democratic now than it ever has been. What was once a medium dominated by liberals has been blown wide open, first by “New Media,” and now by conservative bloggers across the country.
Before the election this past November, the MSM threw everything it had at President Bush. Dan Rather threw his entire career and the reputation of CBS News to the wind in an effort to hurt the President. And now it seems that another formerly reputable member of the MSM, Newsweek, has chosen to make it’s leap into the abyss. This time, however, the cost has been considerably higher.
The Newsweek story, originally published in the “Periscope” section of the mag on May 9, reported that a forthcoming Pentagon investigation was going to reveal that US soldiers desecrated the Quran in an effort to get prisoners to talk. Never mind that it’s SOP for a terrorist to say something like this in order to stir passions, the report itself wound up causing 15 deaths, riots in at least five seperate countries, and who knows how much damage in the form of destroyed vehicles, burned buildings, etc. All on a story that, as it turns out, is not true at all.
Why?!
I think Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com nailed this whole thing with a sledgehammer:
Two points: (1) If they had wrongly reported the race of a criminal and produced a lynching, they’d feel much worse — which is why they generally don’t report such things, a degree of sensitivity they don’t extend to reporting on, you know, minor topics like wars; and (2) If a blogger had made a similar mistake, with similar consequences, we’d be hearing about Big Media’s superior fact-checking and layers of editors.
People died, and U.S. military and diplomatic efforts were damaged, because — let’s be clear here — Newsweek was too anxious to get out a story that would make the Bush Administration and the military look bad.
Here’s the thing that makes this so terribly bad in my mind… PEOPLE DIED!!!!
Human beings lost their lives because of Newsweek’s rush to press on something which, they now admit, had not been properly fact-checked. And almost as bad is the fact that the Islamofascists will use this information to try and convince their followers to kill even more people, perhaps even undermining the significant strides that nations have made in that area towards democracy.
And this is precisely the point of my post… Blogs are effective today and have gained respect in such a short space of time, not necessarily because they are all that, but because liberals in the MSM are SO biased, and SO reckless, and SO dead set on turning the clock back to the days when THEY controlled what Americans heard, saw, and read, that they are making us pajama-wearing amateurs look really good.
These folks are pitiful. They are pathetic.
Worse even is the fact that the editors at Newsweek had the unmitigated gall to try and pass this whole thing off as someone else’s fault:
The spark was apparently lit at a press conference held on Friday, May 6, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and strident critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Brandishing a copy of that week’s NEWSWEEK (dated May 9), Khan read a report that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo prison had placed the Qur’an on toilet seats and even flushed one. “This is what the U.S. is doing,” exclaimed Khan, “desecrating the Qur’an.”
So, you see, it’s not the editors at Newsweek who caused this trouble, it’s the radicals who decided to use that information to foment these riots. I’m not saying that Imram Khan is blameless, clearly he used the information, and the resultant violence, to promote his own agenda, but The ACTUAL problem started with Newsweek, not with Khan.
I wonder, when the editors over at Newsweek look down, do they see blood on their hands?
They should.
David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com
5 Comments
Well, obviously Newsweak does not feel anything they did was problematic, nor does anyone else in MSM. However, the piling on really does nothing to resolve the underlying problem. The National Enquirer could have reported that the United States used the Quran as toilet paper to the same result. The problem is that our Islamofacist friends in the Middle East still hate the US, they still live like cavemen (remember when we used to refer to them as the 3rd world? That was only a few years ago and not much has changed). They have no idea what a responsible Democracy is, and we are in a real fight to bring them into the 21st century beyond their will.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to want to do so. I’m simply saying it’s going to be a long, difficult haul at home and abroad; in the meantime we’ve got some real nursing to do for not only those Iraqi and Afghan nationals attempting this transition but also our troops who are facilitating it with little appreciation from those whom they are fighting for.
Don’t get me wrong, I supported the Iraq war. SH could not be trusted, all the intel said he had what he had and bottom line is we are fighting Al-Queda there, not here. That fact is undeniable. But whether or not Iraqi democracy is going to result in diminishing terrorist threats has yet to be seen and I have some reservations on whether or not it will be successful in eliminating that threat.
That being said, I also don’t think that there was any other course of action at the point we were at. The bag of beans is open after a long period of our collective heads in the sand (Lebanon, Kobar Towers, USS Cole, 1st WTC Attack, etc.) prior to the horrifying realities of 9/11. This war has been going on for a long time, we just didn’t realize it. Now I worry that people forget… until next time, ya know?
The “hearts and minds” battle is as big as the military sucesses (and our military is responsible for winning that, as well!) I pray that their sacrifices will never be in vain.
-Carolyn
Comment by Pooke — 5/21/2005 @ 8:40 pm
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