A deadly blunder?

Media scandals

May 19th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Two paragraphs, many deaths, a Newsweek retraction

IT HAS been a bad couple of years for the “liberal media”, with a stream of American news organisations, usually under fierce fire from conservative critics, having to admit errors in their reporting. None has had such serious consequences as the latest mistake, by Newsweek, which resulted in riots and deaths in the Muslim world.

Newsweek published a story in its May 9th edition, which appeared on May 1st, saying that the Pentagon would soon admit that officials at Guantánamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Koran down a lavatory. The story began to attract attention in the Muslim world on May 6th, when Imran Khan, a famous Pakistani cricketer turned politician, demanded that Pakistan seek an apology from America. Thousands of students in Jalalabad and Kabul in Afghanistan protested violently, and people demonstrated in Indonesia and Gaza. The worst scenes were in Afghanistan, where 17 people died and more than 100 were injured in protests.

At first the Defence Department neither confirmed nor denied Newsweek's story; but it aggressively questioned it after the riots started. In its May 23rd issue, which appeared on May 15th, Newsweek issued a partial apology for the story. A day later, after bombardment from the Bush administration and others, it formally retracted it.

The biggest journalistic problem came because after publication and after the riots, Newsweek's main source, according to the magazine, changed his mind about what he said he knew.
According to its investigative reporter, Michael Isikoff, the source originally said that a forthcoming report from Southern Command in Miami, the military base that runs Guantánamo, would admit that someone in authority had put a copy of the Koran down a toilet to try to get prisoners to talk. When Mr Isikoff interviewed his source again later, the source told him that he could not be certain that he had read about the Koran incident in the report the magazine cited, and that it might have been in “other investigative documents or drafts”.

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, who called Newsweek's first apology insufficient, now wants the magazine to go further and help “repair the damage” by “talking about the way they got this wrong”. He has suggested that Newsweek publish a story explaining the lengths to which the Pentagon has gone to meet the concerns of Muslim prisoners.

Conservative talk-shows and internet sites have depicted Newsweek as yet another liberal, unpatriotic media outlet only too willing to criticise America's conduct in the war on terror. The magazine's defenders argue that the fact that its source couldn't pinpoint the correct military investigative report does not mean that its story was wrong in substance. Testimony from prisoners at Guantánamo, after all, backs up the assertion that guards and interrogators have mistreated the Koran.

According to Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, three British inmates who were released last year, guards have indeed thrown the Koran in the toilet. Other current detainees have also complained about religious intimidation and humiliation at Guantánamo. Last week, according to both Reuters and Agence France Presse, Southern Command began an inquiry to check if its employees have ever thrown the Koran into the toilet.

That does not get Newsweek off the hook: after all, it published the story only because it believed the American army was actually admitting to abusing the Koran. Why did Newsweek rely on just one anonymous source?

The magazine, it turns out, thought the source was confirming other evidence. Its journalists (wrongly) believed that an account of flushing the Koran down the toilet was already contained in a series of internal e-mails released late last year from the FBI that described abuses at Guantánamo. In addition, Mr Isikoff's co-author, John Barry, showed a draft of the piece to an official at the Defence Department, who contradicted part of it, but did not quarrel with the part about the Koran. The journalists concluded that silence meant that the story must be right.

Other recent journalistic mistakes—at other venerable media outlets such as the New York Times, USA Today, CNN and CBS News—have resulted in people resigning or being fired, because internal rules were not followed. Newsweek is refusing to take any disciplinary action against its reporters, since it says the story was reported carefully. Its editors will also be aware that there is still a chance, however small, that Southern Command's inquiry, or another inquiry, will find that abuse of the Koran did indeed take place.

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