A Paragon of Responsibility

I would shrug this off, if it were the first time something like this had happened. You may remember that Newsweek recently reported, in a story that was picked up immediately by just about everybody, that American interogators flushed pages of the Koran down the toilet in an attempt to get prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to talk. Newsweek reported this in a rather casual fashion, apparently inserting the small piece into one of their roundup-type columns.

Well, as you can imagine (and I'm sure as Newsweek could have imagined), all hell broke loose in the Muslim world. Massive protests, flag burnings, demands for the US to apologize...and in the end, 16 people died and 100 were wounded in Afghanistan in the course of these actions.

So here we are on a cool Sunday evening, possibly the slowest news time of the week, and what do we see? Newsweek now admits that there is no evidence for the story, and that their source has become confused. It seems that they relied on a single guy who claimed not to have actually seen or participated in this activity, but to have read about it in a military report. Now the man says it may not have been in a report, but maybe it was in a draft of this or that, but man, he's sure he saw it somewhere.

A single source. No eyewitness. No confirmation. No documentary evidence. I didn't go to journalism school, but I can sure as hell smell a poorly researched story when I hear one. If they wanted to hold onto it as a tip and do further work, fine. But this is the "mainstream media" we're always hearing about, and this is shoddier than most blog-level commentary.

They were careless. People died. And the saddest part is it will happen again, just as soon as someone gets wind of a topic that's too "sexy" to hang onto long enough to research properly.