We Report. You Die. Pt IV

Kurtz kurtzes some more:

Some analysts see parallels between the Newsweek debacle and Dan Rather's "60 Minutes Wednesday" story on President Bush's National Guard service, in that both took on the administration, both should have been held for further checking and both relied on unnamed sources. But while CBS's source turned out to be an anti-Bush zealot, Newsweek says Isikoff spoke to a senior government official who had been reliable in the past. And while CBS defended the Guard report for 12 days, Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker apologized and said the story was wrong in just over a day.

That hasn't stopped White House, Pentagon and State Department officials from denouncing Newsweek. But presidential spokesman Scott McClellan's insistence that the magazine "help repair the damage" in the Muslim world has triggered a backlash on the left.

"Now it's Newsweek's job to repair the image of the U.S.?" scoffs liberal radio host Stephanie Miller. "It's amazing they want Newsweek to take accountability when no one in the administration has taken accountability for either the unnecessary war or Abu Ghraib.

"This is part of the chilling effect the administration wants to have on the media, an attempt to shut down any further investigative reporting. Most of the media is so scared they'll do anything not to appear liberal."

One other parallel: Some people believe that the Koran desecration, as alleged by a number of detainees, is "likely true," as Miller put it, just as former CBS producer Mary Mapes says the botched National Guard story is still true. The appalling abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib certainly makes seem the Koran incident seem plausible. But as CBS and now Newsweek have learned, believing something could well be true is a long way from journalistically proving it.

So after defending Michael Isikoff and quoting Torie Clarke defending the media against an anti-military bias, Kurtz reports the Tinfoil Hat Brigade's claim that Scott McClellan responding to a question Terry Moran pressed him on somehow has "a chilling effect" on an MSM which couldn't even be bothered to attempt to flush a Koran down their own toilet to substantiate a wild claim made by America's enemies. Some chilling effect.

John Leo, as usual, shows Howie Kurtz what a real media critic does for a living:

It's official. conservatives are losing their monopoly on complaints about media bias. In the wake of Newsweek 's bungled report that U.S. military interrogators "flushed a Qur'an down a toilet," here is Terry Moran, ABC's White House reporter, in an interview with radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt: "There is, I agree with you, a deep antimilitary bias in the media, one that begins from the premise that the military must be lying and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong." Moran thinks it's a hangover from Vietnam. Sure, but the culture of the newsroom is a factor, too. In all my years in journalism, I don't think I have met more than one or two reporters who have ever served in the military or who even had a friend in the armed forces. Most media hiring today is from universities where a military career is regarded as bizarre and almost any exercise of American power is considered wrongheaded or evil.

Not long ago, memorable comments about press credibility came from two stars at Newsweek: Evan Thomas and Howard Fineman. During the presidential campaign, Thomas said on TV that the news media wanted John Kerry to win. We knew that, but the candor was refreshing. Fineman said during the flap over Dan Rather and CBS's use of forged documents on the George Bush-National Guard story: "A political party is dying before our eyes--and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the 'mainstream media' . . . . It's hard to know now who, if anyone, in the 'media' has any credibility." It's worth mentioning here that the unrepentant Rather and his colleague Mary Mapes, who was fired for her role in presenting the forged documents, received a major industry award last week, a Peabody, as well as "extended applause" from the journalists in the crowd. (What's next? A lifetime achievement award for New York Times prevaricator Jayson Blair?)

Journalism is not a profession. Professions have standards, and enforce them.

Mark Steyn simply knows everything:

On the other hand, there are those who point out it's hardly Newsweek's fault that some goofy foreigners are so bananas they'll riot and kill over one rumor of one disrespectful act to one copy of one book. Christians don't riot over ''Piss Christ'' and other provocations by incontinent ''artists.'' Jews take it in their stride when they're described as ''a virus resembling AIDS,'' which is what Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris said a week ago in his sermon on Palestinian state TV, funded by the European Union. Muslims can dish it out big-time, so why can't they take it, even the teensy-weensiest bit?

All of which is also true, but would be a better defense of Newsweek if the media hadn't spent the last 3-1/2 years bending over backwards to be super-sensitive to the, ah, touchiness of the Muslim world -- until the opportunity for a bit of lurid Bush-bashing proved too much to resist. In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs -- not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.

Watching the media circling the wagons around the beleaguered Isikoff this week, Martin Peretz of the New Republic described them as ''a profession that is complacent, self-righteous, and hopelessly in love with itself.'' The media are the message: But, hey, enough about the war, let's talk about me.

As for the wackiness of Muslim fanatics, well, up to a point. But, you know, we've been told ever since 9/11 that the allegedly seething ''Muslim street'' was about to explode, and for four years it's remained as somnolent as a suburban cul-de-sac on a weekday afternoon. Invade their countries, topple their rulers, bomb their infrastructure from the first day of Ramadan to the last, arrest their terrorists, hold them at Gitmo for half a decade, initiate reforms setting the Arab world on the first rung of the ladder to political and economic liberty, and the seething Muslim street gives one almighty shrug.

BTW, Googling "Mark Steyn" and "I wish I'd written that" yields 37,100 hits.

Of course, since Newsweek did nothing wrong, one wonders why they felt the need to change their policy:

"From now on, only the editor or the managing editor, or other top editors they specifically appoint, will have the authority to sign off on the use of an anonymous source," Richard M. Smith, Newsweek's chairman and editor-in-chief, wrote in the edition of the magazine for sale this week.

The name and position of such a source will be shared with the top editor, and the magazine will try to characterize the source appropriately, Smith said in his letter to readers explaining how news-gathering procedures would be improved following the retracted report.

"The cryptic phrase 'sources said' will never again be the sole attribution for a story in Newsweek," he said.

Must be that "chilling effect".