Newsweek is going to be having a really bad week. On the heels of a discredited report that US soldiers flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet at GitMo, the magazine has had to issue a correction.
Not a minor one about some trivial fact.
No, this is a doozy. It seems that the source of the story cannot confirm what he originally said and that there is no other corroborating evidence that the incident ever happened.
Now, this might not seem like a big deal since newspapers and magazines make mistakes all the time. Well, this particular mistake caused riots throughout South Asia. People have died. US soldiers lives are at further risk in places like Afghanistan because the local Muslim population believed the story.
No amount of retractions and mea culpas from Newsweek will bring back the lives of those killed in the riots, nor will they prevent further bloodshed caused by the story being run.
To their credit, Newsweek is prominently displaying this particular correction. The problem is that the story should never have run in the first place. The time to do due diligence and research for a story is before it runs, not after.
How many times does the media have to get it wrong before they get the message. They know that their words have meaning and effects. People (that would be bloggers like LGF, Michelle Malkin, Power Line, Captain's Quarters, and a list too numerous to mention in its entirety here) are fact checking their words and messages, and yet they continue to make damaging mistakes that put people in danger. Yet, the same media questions the ability of those bloggers to get the story right.
UPDATE 5/16/2005 10:06AM EDT:
Lest I forget, Instapundit is on the ball. He cautions to remind us about the Freedom of Speech implications, and that censoring of communications isn't a good thing, even in wartime, but what drove Newsweek to run this incendiary story of dubious origin.
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