"Um...sorry?"

Legend has it that a hoax story in an American newspaper, which said the Chinese were planning to tear down the Great Wall, led to the Boxer Revolution. It didn't, but it's the first thing I thought of when I heard about violent anti-American protests in Afghanistan, spurred on by a brief Newsweek report about Guantanamo Bay interrogators allegedly desecrating the Koran.

Now, after several deaths and untold damage to America's reputation in that relatively pro-American country, Newsweek says the story was wrong. Mind you, I'm not holding my breath waiting for any of the rioters (or their apologists in the West) to stand back and say they might have over-reacted. After all, the media is completely controlled by the CIA, which in turn is controlled by the Zionists, right? (How the story therefore made it into Newsweek in the first place is the kind of question rarely asked by that crowd.)

Several bloggers say Newsweek should not have reported on this in the first place, even if they had firm evidence it was true. On freedom-of-expression grounds, I cannot agree - but I think Glenn Reynolds has it exactly right:

Two points: (1) If they had wrongly reported the race of a criminal and produced a lynching, they'd feel much worse -- which is why they generally don't report such things, a degree of sensitivity they don't extend to reporting on, you know, minor topics like wars; and (2) If a blogger had made a similar mistake, with similar consequences, we'd be hearing about Big Media's superior fact-checking and layers of editors.

People died, and U.S. military and diplomatic efforts were damaged, because -- let's be clear here -- Newsweek was too anxious to get out a story that would make the Bush Administration and the military look bad.

Posted by damian at May 15, 2005 06:47 PM | TrackBack