Patterico's Pontifications

5/17/2005

Unclear on the Concept

Filed under: Dog Trainer,Media Bias — Patterico @ 12:14 pm



Jay Rosen noticed something interesting this morning. The Los Angeles Times has an article today about Newsweek’s questionable use of an anonymous source. The L.A. Times article quotes a source from Newsweek, who chooses to remain — you guessed it — anonymous:

A Newsweek journalist familiar with the reporting on the article agreed with his editor’s regrets Monday, but said it appeared the administration was seizing on the error to minimize the abuse allegations.

“The issue of how prisoners are treated at Guantanamo has not gone away,” said the journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Now they want to deflect that by talking about how irresponsible Newsweek magazine was.”

I’m not necessarily critical of this. But I can’t help but find it amusing.

3 Responses to “Unclear on the Concept”

  1. Newsweek’s big mistake was totally missing how ridiculous this story is. So some guard rips out one page at a time dropping it into the toilet, to screams of the Islam prisoners? Or some guard dumps the whole book in the toilet then realizes, “damn, this won’t flush.” What exactly was Newsweek claiming happened?

    The rule should be: When the story is that monkeys are flying out of someone’s ass, get at least 2 sources.

    Ladainian (91b3b2)

  2. Hmm. The LA Times’ source obviously hasn’t learned much during the last week. The assertion is that there is a serious issue with the way prisoners are treated in Guantanamo. But it’s just an assertion, and a pretty self-serving one in this context.

    As a look into the mindset at Newsweek it is somewhat illuminating, but at the moment I have grave doubts about any Newsweek journalist’s ability to distinguish abuse allegations from fact or their desire to do so. So why should I care about some secondhand sour-grapes slap at the administration? Especially when they won’t even identify themselves.

    Bryan C (3cbda4)

  3. Having served in the Middle East, the thing that gripes me the most about the Newsweek story (and others like it), is that it damages the military effort in a different way than you think.

    The PR damage is serious, but when one of these stories hit hundreds, if not thousands of hours are lost as we have to investigate the charges, file various reports, call soldiers away from their missions etc. I can imagine that right now some poor SPC is inspecting each Koran in each detainee facility to see if any pages are missing. All because of irresponsible journalism.

    Here in Raleigh I am going after the coverage by the local paper, The News and Observer, in the same way you get the LA Times. Thanks for leading the way and providing an example.

    Scott (3a771c)


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