Sunday, April 16, 2006

Look what those Newsweek guys are doing now?

Remember that false Newsweek’s story last May about guards at Gitmo flushing Koran pages down a toilet?

It sparked rioting in the Muslim world that resulted in at least 15 deaths, hundreds injured and increased Muslim hostility directed at Americans.

John Barry , Newsweek’s national security correspondent, was assigned to verify the story with Pentagon sources but botched the job.

Evan Thomas was the editor who gave the report a green light for publication based on “confirmation” from a single source who later told Barry that maybe he hadn’t seen the document Barry had asked him about.

You can read more about all of that at Frontpagemag.com's "Newsweek's Victims."

And what are Barry and Thomas doing now?

Just as you’d expect if you know how MSM works, their false Gitmo toilet flushing story hasn’t slowed their careers. In fact, they’ve moved on to bigger things.

This week Barry and Thomas team up to write Newsweek’s lead story: a lengthy hit piece targeting Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. (Anatomy of a Revolt - What made a chorus of ex-generals call for the Seder’s head? The war over the war—and how Rumsfeld is reacting.)

You’d know it was a hit piece just from the headlines.

Revolt? No one’s revolting. Some retired officers are speaking out. That’s nothing new.

“Chorus of ex-generals?” Six are speaking out but I’ll bet by next week we could get a hundred more to do the same.

And what would that prove? Betsy Newmark “did the math” today at her blog. There are about 4,700 retired generals living in the U. S. If we have 106 speaking out that's about 2%.

I'm going to continue to read what outfits like Newsweek and the NY Times say about Rumsfeld. But I'll also reading Michael Barone, Charles Krauthammer, NRO, Powerline , Instapundit, Weekly Standard, and others say.

Meanwhile, a request to Newsweek and the NY Times: Please spend less time telling us what's wrong at the Pentagon, and more time trying to figure out what's wrong at your organizations.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, at least we're seening the much vaunted "balanced" and "objective" press including both sides equally.

(sound of crickets chirping)

Never mind.

-AC