John Podhoretz:
...It was a killer story. Just to die for.
Let's say that the item that Newsweek magazine disavowed on Sunday and retracted yesterday — the item by Michael Isikoff and John Barry that said an American interrogator of terrorists housed at Guantanamo Bay had flushed the Koran down the toilet — was actually true. It wasn't. But let's say it was.
Would factual accuracy have justified publishing the item in Newsweek or anywhere else?
That publication led to the furtherance of the notion, extraordinarily dangerous to Americans abroad, that our government is in the habit of desecrating the Muslim Holy Book — and to scores of people getting killed and hundreds getting injured in riots that extended from Afghanistan to Gaza.
The answer seems obvious now, doesn't it?
Newsweek ran an incendiary item about an American official desecrating the Koran, and this incendiary item did what incendiary items are supposed to do. It blew up.
Only it didn't blow up the target it was intended to blow up. The intended target was in Washington. We'd have to know the identity of Newsweek's supposedly "good and credible" source to know precisely whom the source was trying to injure (and you can bet that, no matter what evil nonsense this supposedly "good" source was peddling, Newsweek will protect his name forever).
...
In this case, the potential consequences should have outweighed — by a factor of about 1 billion — the very mild benefit to Newsweek to running something titillating about the War on Terror in its Periscope section.
And so what if the item had been true? Journalists routinely withhold the truth from their readers for all sorts of reasons.
They don't reveal the names of "good and credible" sources, for example, which is a withholding of a truth. They don't publish the identities of rape accusers. Many papers no longer reveal the race of a crime suspect, even though the purpose of describing a crime suspect is to help ordinary citizens avoid him or report him to the authorities.
Why do they withhold these facts? They do so because they have decided that something else is more important than the revelation of all known facts — something like the right of a crime victim to privacy, or the fear of making all black and Latino males seem stereotypically frightening.
We've already learned that the mainstream media do not believe the reputation of the United States at a time of ideological war against Muslim extremism is worthy of the same care. In fact, in many quarters there is a moral and spiritual incentive to tell horrid tales about the United States and its conduct of the War on Terror.
So Newsweek went and told one such horrid tale. And the world has reaped the whirlwind. The fact that the tale in question is a cock-and-bull story is almost beside the point.
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