We’ve written previously about the Newsweek mess here, here, and here.
Thanks to Hugh Hewitt, I read this blog this morning.
Jay Rosen says many wise and interesting things, and you will want to read the entire post. He has some wonderful suggestions for improving reporting. I hope the right people listen to him, because I yearn to be able to trust mainstream news sources.
For my purposes, I just want to focus on two or three specific points from his post here. To begin with, read this excellent summing up of the recently discredited Newsweek report:
The very difficulty of summarizing what the faulty report said tells us something vital about it. To wit:
Newsweek, which I will call S1 for our first level source, and for which we have names (Michael Isikoff, Mark Whitaker, John Barry) said that it had sources (S2) without names, who in turn said that other sources (S3) also without names, working as investigators for the government, have learned enough from their sources (S4), likewise unnamed, to conclude in a forthcoming report for U.S. Southern Command (finally, a name!) that unnamed interrogators (S5) dumped the Qur’an into toilets to make a point with prisoners (S6) who are Muslims but also not named.
We’ll find out more about the ‘reliable sources’ without names in a moment.
He also says,
“That doesn’t mean a charge like desecration of the Koran should never be reported. If United States policy is to show scrupulous respect for holy texts, then it matters if American policy is being violated. I don’t agree at all with La Shawn Barber: “Newsweek should not have reported it, even if true.” But I do agree that the possible consequences in being wrong–and being right–should have been factored in, driving the need for reliability up, up, up. But nothing like this happened at Newsweek.”
I also did not agree with LaShawn when she said that NW should not have reported the story whether or not it was true- if it had been true and they had solid confirmation, they should have reported it. They also should have provided context, such as, is it just one interrogator who has since been relieved of his duties, what the U.S. military policies are for treatment of the Koran and other books holy to their readers. They did not do this with the recent prison scandal at Abu Ghraib, where the context is rather different than the reporting of the story would lead readers to believe.
But at any rate, while the U.S. Military does have strict orders for how to treat the Koran and how to behave with respect to the standards of a host country, the U.S. media does not have a policy of showing scrupulous respect for texts holy to believers of some stripes. The press, as The Anchoress points out, didn’t seem so disturbed when a picture of Mary was surrounded by elephant dung, or when a crucifix was displayed immersed in urine. Those two things were ‘art,’ and part of what made them ‘art’ was the fact that they offended the sensibilities of certain people, therefore, creating an emotional reaction. Apparently, artistic and creative may be defined as offending people- but only if the offense as an act of creation offends the right people- Catholics, for instance. Those stories were reported in such a way as to be about censorship, idiotic rednecks, and free speech.
Allegedly fushing a Koran down a toilet is not artistic free speech merely because it offends the wrong people. It offends Muslims (especially those who blow up church buildings, oppress Christians, and who beat women for not covering their faces). Offending *those* people by disrespectflly handling an inanimate object in front of them is ‘torture.’
As Glenn Reynolds points out, to include such acts under the heading ‘torture’ is to make a mockery of those who actually have been tortured. By this definition, Bible believers in America have been tortured for decades by our popular culture.
But let us return to Jay Rosen’s post. Exactly what kind of sources did Newsweek rely on?
It appears that one of them was not really a source for the allegation but a Pentagon official who was shown the report and didn’t disconfirm it. From the New York Times account by Katharine Seelye:
In addition, the reporters, Michael Isikoff, a veteran investigative reporter, and John Barry, a national security correspondent, showed a draft of the article to the source and to a senior Pentagon official asking if it was correct. The source corrected one aspect of the article, which focused on the Southern Command’s internal report on prisoner abuse.
“But he was silent about the rest of the item,” Newsweek reported.That is the most revealing fact I have come across so far, because it is very clear how much weaker didn’t disconfirm is when compared to alternatives like “Colonel Jones said…”
Did he confirm it?
No, but he didn’t disconfirm it.Oh, so is that confirmation?
Well, he would have warned us, I think.
Right, right. He would have warned us.
When I say “thin” that is the kind of thing I mean.
By this standard, any of us could have been a source for the Newsweek story because we could not confirm the story, neither could we ‘disconfirm’ it. Twenty thousand people work in the Pentagon. The Headmaster and some of our offspring took a tour of the Pentagon when we were in D.C. last week. They say it’s like a town, and you only would need to leave to go home to see your family- otherwise, all the amenities are available. It has a larger population than our county. An awfully large percentage of those 20,000 people must be unaware of everything that happens there and could also have been available for ‘not disconfirming’ the story. I have a friend who works in the Pentagon. I could ask him questions he couldn’t answer and then say that he didn’t disconfirm my story. When Jay says ‘thin,’ I think we should be picturing something wispy as an old cobweb. A tatty, dusty, dirty old cobweb.
Jay explains the situation behind each of these unnamed sources, S1, S2, etc. You’ll want, as I’ve said, to read the whole thing.
S2 is one who really interests me. He’s one of those 20,000 people working in the Pentagon:
Source Level 3 are the (unnamed) “investigators probing interrogation abuses.” They are the ones who will compile the report for U.S. Southern Command. What Newsweek’s sources “had” was simply a prediction about what these people would be putting in their report. (Whitaker in a piece Newsweek ran Monday: “Our original source later said he couldn’t be certain about reading of the alleged Qur’an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.”)
Newsweek knows who this is, and this is the only one of their sources that they can give a name to. I want S2 outed. I want to know his motives for passing on information he had so little knowledge of. I want to know who he is. I also wonder about his clarity of mind. I imagine he reads many reports. For all we know, he could just be an admin troop, a typist. Maybe he reads so many reports he gets the details mixed up.
I’m thinking of a report I heard on NPR yesterday. According to NPR, a review of the logs at Gitmo found only one incident of a Koran in proximity with a toilet- in that case, a detainee tore pages out of the Koran and flushed them down the toilet in a protest attempt to block up the toilets. Is it at all possible this S2 read that report and jumbled it in his mind with the SouthCom report?
S6 is also an interesting source:
Source Level 6, also unnamed, are the prisoners for whom the alleged action would have been intended– a special class of witness.
Yes, well, S6- hardly reliable, given the Al Queda Training Manual instructions for prisoners (thanks to Grayhawk):
IF AN INDICTMENT IS ISSUED AND THE TRIAL, BEGINS, THE BROTHER HAS TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE FOLLOWING:
1. At the beginning of the trial, once more the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security [investigators] before the judge.
2. Complain [to the court] of mistreatment while in prison.
I say that this also makes another source a bit dicey, those defense lawyers and others representing the prisoners. All their information is hearsay, after all, and it all comes from S6- those prisoners who have been instructed to lie about being tortured and mistreated.
See Grayhawk of Mudville for more.
5. Are Newsweek’s reporters unaware of the Al Queda manual? They don’t seem to have exercised any scepticism about reports from prisoners.
4. Since when is an absence of ‘disconfirmation’ to be taken for solid confirmation?
3. Shouldn’t somebody at Newsweek have wondered about the liklihood that the interrogation process would include flushing a Koran in order to convince a Muslim witness to talk? Wouldn’t that have precisely the opposite result?
deuce. What happened to the vetting process we are assured distinguishes Mainstream Media from the heavyweights in the blogging world? We have here half a dozen unnamed sources, and the only one of them with whom reporters actually spoke to can only attest to reading something about a Koran, a toilet, and a flushing somewhere, sometime in some report, but he doesn’t remember for sure which report. Maybe he read it in Al Jazeera.
Ace. Torture is something done to one’s person. It is not something done to inanimate objects.
Looks like Newsweek is a straight flush to me. We already do not subscribe. What about you?