The other question about Newsweek's reporting

Newsweek has withdrawn its report of interrogators at Guantanamo flushing a copy of the Q'uran down a toilet. Obviously, have a single source who bails on you isn't good enough, but this begs the question of whether the story should have been printed at all, given its lack of news value. Most Americans couldn't care less, because they aren't as sensitive about their own scriptures as Muslims purportedly are. What is gained by this report, other than to ? I doubt it would change anybody's mind about supporting or opposing the administration's detainee and interrogations policies, but "professional journalists" these days seem to have a reflex to publish anything that might make George Bush look bad. It's almost a part of "journalistic ethics."

I watched an interview last night on Brit Hume's show with Bob Zelnick, the head of the journalism department at Boston University and a former correspondent at ABC News. Zelnick, who is also quoted by the WaPo made the usual remark about the danger of single-sourcing a story that could be so volatile, but he also said:

I don’t think this amounts, in terms of journalistic technique, to the kind of egregious performance we saw by Dan Rather and CBS in the Air National Guard story. But I think, in a case like this, the discretion is the better part of valor. And I would have been really reticent about it.

Another thing I would add about this, Brit. I may be in a distinct minority here, but I think that, even if I believed this story to be true, I would have been reluctant to go with it, because I think the emotional impact so far exceeded the journalistic value of what I was offering, that I would have just let this — let someone else break this if I was going to lose it.. . .

[T]his was a lapse into the CBS practice, saying that we admit our source was wrong, but we can’t prove a negative, we can’t prove that the events didn’t happen, therefore, we’re not going to retract. [italics added]

Of course, Zelnick isn't full of the vitriol against Bush that seems to afflict everybody working in news media. He's certainly more circumspect, and wisely so, than journalistic cowboys like Dan Rather and Mary Mapes.

I keep reading that journalists are supposed to "hold power accountable" and "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," but those are just cliches and, if you don't apply them evenly and with judgment, hypocrisy. What people are wondering today is "who holds the power of the media accountable?" It seems incredible that after the "60 Minutes II" debacle, not to mention the Jayson Blair scandal, reporters like Michael Isikoff, well-known by most news junkies and well-regarded by his fellow reporters, should show so little caution about publishing a story like this. The White House is not passive in dealing with gaffes like this anymore. It will strike back if given a chance, and justifiably so given the overt hostility of Old Media. Talk Radio hosts and bloggers also jumped on this story and rubbed Newsweek's nose in it. I suspect that a new growth industry will, or should be, Red State sensitivity training for journalists, or how not to reveal your bias.

Newsweek's defense has been that everybody knew that there was abuse occurring at Guantanamo, but the sources seem to be detainees or their lawyers. And there are also plenty of reports of Muslim "activists" desecrating the Q'uran by booby-trapping copies, cutting out pages to conceal things and making up reports like this to stir up hatred for the West. Then, of course, you could predict this reaction from the rabble rousers who foment protesting mobs.

Maybe an answer to Sheikh Rashid Ahmed would be this, from James Taranto:

[B]y way of comparison, recall that three years ago Palestinian Arab terrorists occupied the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Priests reported that "gunmen tore up Bibles for toilet paper," according to the Daily Camera of Boulder, Colo. The Chicago Tribune noted after the siege that "altars had been turned into cooking and eating tables, a sacrilege to the religious faithful."

Christians in the U.S. responded by declining to riot and refraining from killing anyone. They had the same response 15 or so years ago when the National Endowment for the Arts was subsidizing the scatological desecration of a crucifix and other Christian symbols. This should also put to rest the oft-heard calumny that America's "religious right" is somehow a Christian equivalent of our jihadi enemies.