Newsweak's Fatal Mistake

Wow. What a firestorm, literally, that Newsweak has ignited.

First was "the scoop": that interrogators in Gitmo had desecrated the "Holy" Koran during interrogations. This came from an "unimpeachable" government source.

Strong suggestion to the Newsweak staff: before you claim "unimpeachable" sources, please feel free to consult Dan Rather, FORMERLY of CBS (or, as I still like to call it...."See B S").

Second came the riots. Tailor made. Anti-American riots, just like the anti-Bush MSM wanted. Innocents killed during the riots.

I can only imagine the visions of Pulitzer's dancing in Newsweak's mind.

Until. A road-bump. Turns out the unimpeachable source has been impeached after all.

After the road bump....the end of the road. The riot that Newsweak so desired, ended up in their own lobby. The White House, and all of OBJECTIVE newsmedia (meaning exclude Newsweak, CBS, CNN, and especially it appears to be MSNBC this time)....found out the truth.

The funniest thing of all after Newsweak's story went off the road was their spokesman's feeble attempt at damage control....they couldn't retract the story "until we know the facts?"

"Until we know the facts" - that is the excuse to NOT retract a story, but it sure wasn't anything that got in the way of the story being published IN THE FIRST PLACE. Evidently attending a credible journalism school (even by correspondence) is secondary to being Anti-Bush in the hiring pool these days.

The funniest thing of all? Someone saw this coming LAST WEEK. I heard it first on his radio show, but, Dennis Prager has expounded upon those thoughts here.

To wit:

As I said on my radio show days before Newsweek revealed that its report was baseless, even if the report were true, the magazine was highly irresponsible when it published the report. It could have only one effect: inflaming the wrath of hundreds of millions of Muslims against America.

If an American interrogator of Japanese prisoners desecrated the most sacred Japanese symbols during World War II, it is inconceivable that any American media would have published this information. While American news media were just as interested in scoops in 1944 as they are now, they also had a belief that when America was at war, publishing information injurious to America and especially to its troops was unthinkable.

Such a value is not only not honored by today's news media, the opposite is more likely the case. The mainstream media oppose the war in Iraq and loathe the Bush administration. Whatever weakens the war effort and embarrasses the president raises a news source's prestige among its domestic, and especially foreign, peers.

Newsweek is directly responsible for the deaths of innocents and for damaging America. As a typical member of the American news media, Newsweek's primary loyalties are to profits and to its political/social agenda.

The obvious liberal bias of the MSM continues. First, CBS was a casualty of their own blinders to reach an agenda. Now, it's Newsweak's turn. Next, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who apparently went off the deep end in trying to defend the "government source" behind the original story....ummmmmm, I thought the source was "an anonymous and UNIMPEACHABLE" source...does Keith have insider information with his liberally slanted buddies at Newsweak?

Also, speaking of the media bias and how it's still there...check out this gem from Hugh Hewitt's blog today:

My cross-country trip last night was on JetBlue, which meant I got to watch all of the talking heads chew on the Newsweek fiasco. One common theme is that Isikoff is a talented investigative reporter without a similar screw-up in his past. Chris Matthews was praising him to the sky, which struck me as about as appropriate as praising a NASCAR drivers record of wins in the aftermath of vehicular manslaughter involving a street crash with a teenage driver who may have been partly to blame. There aren't any mulligans in American law when negligence leads to the death of innocents. (spelling error fixed here...c'mon Hugh!)



Finally, on a lighter note...it's been a while since I've commented on the Ward Churchill saga. Apparently he hasn't been in the headlines until recently....

Well, apparently he has resurfaced (HT to Michigan Bowhunter at Free Republic and NewsMax)...and it looks like he was at the protests over the weekend.

You be the judge:

Funny how anytime someone protests the U.S., he shows up, isn't it?