PokornyPundit

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Monday, May 16, 2005

Newsweek's little blunder

Ah, the power of the mainstream media: they can royally screw up and still manage to take the rest of the world along with them. Newsweek has fallen victim to a continuing trend among "respected" media outlets (ala The New York Times and CBS) of getting things wrong and still hesitating to fully apologize and/or retract their mistakes.

Violent protests broke out in Afghanistan last week after the magazine cited sources saying investigators looking into abuses at the military prison found interrogators "had placed Qurans on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet."

You'd think someone in the Newsweek hierarchy might have wanted to look into that a little before publishing it, considering that in many Islamic countries, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, actions like this warrant the death penalty.

Afghani government spokesman Jawed Ludin said his government expresses "in the strongest terms our disapproval of Newsweek's approach to reporting which allowed them to run this story without proper examination beforehand."

And how does Newsweek respond?

Newsweek's Washington bureau chief, Dan Klaidman, said the apparent error was "terribly unfortunate," and he offered the magazine's sympathies to the victims.

Oh wait, it doesn't end there... this is one of Newsweek's many explanations for why the Muslim protests were carried out in the manner that they were:

"There are a lot of people who think that our war on terror and our war in Iraq is a much wider war against Islam," [Klaidman] said.

Thanks, Captain Obvious, I'll log that one away. If this hotshot of a journalist is so sharp as to be able to make that conclusion, you'd think maybe some other genius over at Newsweek (because clearly Newsweek only hires the best and the brightest) would hesitate to write such things that would only serve to fuel that sentiment.

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