I didn't want to blog this. But when a good friend repeats a lie as truth and gets upset over it, truth just has to get its shoes on. So here goes.
Newsweek didn't kill anyone. Anyone who claims different is selling something.
Newsweek reported old news. The reporter, Michael Isikoff, had good sources in the Administration. He did all the right things. He had what he considered to be a reliable source. It was even buried deep in the back of the magazine.
The fact that people rioted, and people died, after the story came out is not the fault of Newsweek. It's the fault of whoever stuffed a Quran down the toilet. It's the fault of those who committed torture in our name, those who turned a blind eye to it, and ultimately those at the top. In the end I'm guessing that for every potential life saved by anything given under torture, at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, wherever, we created 100 terrorists, maybe more.
So let's get the story straight.
Those people rioted because of George W. Bush, because the U.S. no longer has any credibility anywhere in the Muslim World, because people were willing to believe the worst and act on it.
There is one thing worse than the rioting and the torture, however.
That is the willingness of millions of Americans, maybe even including you, to be conned by what is by now an old game of press control that could have come out of the early days of the Soviet Union.
It's the same game played in Rathergate. Dan Rather had his facts right. George W. Bush disappeared in 1972 and never explained himself, either to his superiors or the American people. He was AWOL. But, by focusing on some papers used in that report's evidence, most Americans came to believe the opposite, that CBS was lying and therefore Bush was an honorable veteran.
Both stories had the same result. People believed what they wanted to believe. People made a choice to believe Rathergate cleared Bush. People chose to believe Newsweek caused those riots.
This is precisely what happens when an American ideology cracks up, when it can no longer explain the facts. It's what happened over a century ago, when the Civil War ideology could not explain the Panic of 1893. It was the case in the early 1930s when the certitides of Progressivism could not explain the Great Depression. It is happening now to the Nixon ideology that emerged in the late 1960s, just as it did to the Lyndon Johnson Administration 40 years ago, as Robert McNamara struggled to explain and justify Vietnam.
This is also, coincidentally, what happens whenever tyranny raises its head over a land and a people. Lies become truth, 2+2=5.
Well here's some news for you.
2+2=4. Four. F-o-u-r. Those riots were anti-American riots, not anti-Newsweek riots. And the cause they were rioting about has still not properly been explained, by anyone, only covered up.
That's the story. That's the truth. And it doesn't matter whether you believe it. Because 2+2 always equals 4.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Andreas on May 19, 2005 07:58 AM writes...
I would like commend this article published by the World Socialist Web Site today:
Further bullying of US media
Permalink to CommentWhite House demands Newsweek “repair the damage”
By David Walsh, 19 May 2005
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/news-m19.shtml
2. Jonathan Peterson on May 19, 2005 02:39 PM writes...
Obviously the people at fault for the deaths in the riots were the rioters themselves, yes? I agree that Newsweek seemed to largely do current journalistic practices - running a story quoting an anonymous source. Eventually the press may realize that it's insular and egotistic love of being first with a story sets them up for errors and damages their credibility.
While there is a place for anonymous sources, the sooner the press stops running stories from administration backgrounders (Hell, from PR flacks for that matter) and insists on attribution, Washington will have to go on the record, which would be better for us all.
Permalink to Comment3. Brad Hutchings on May 19, 2005 07:27 PM writes...
Oh Jonathan... How dare you blame the rioters for rioting! That is so 1990s of you. It's not even politically incorrrect and rebelious to think that way in the new millenium. It is anti-Islam and rascist. There is going to be a fatwa attached to your posterior faster than ice cream through a lactose intollerant golf fan.
The true power of Islam, as practiced in these far away countries, is that there hasn't been an SNL skit about flushing the Koran down the toilet, there haven't been 100 blogs with QuickTime videos of toilets backing up, or a MythBusters episode on Discovery. Hell, one of my friends recently created a gigantic plumbing problem when she accidently flushed a toothpaste tube down the toilet! I bet Dave Chappelle doesn't touch this with a 10 foot plunger when he gets over his tantrum and flies home to finish Season 3 for Comedy Central.
Yes the true power of this kind of Islam is that the net is powerless to tell these halfwits to get over themselves.
Permalink to Comment4. Roy Troxel on May 27, 2005 09:17 AM writes...
Has anyone here ever tried to flush a book down a toilet?
If so, I'd like to hear how it's done.
Permalink to Comment5. Roy Troxel on May 27, 2005 02:45 PM writes...
You wrote:
"I don't know either but the story Newsweek wrote has now been confirmed.
So ask them."
According to the May 30 issue of Newsweek:
"Last week, NEWSWEEK interviewed Command Sgt. John VanNatta, who served as the prison's warden from October 2002 to the fall of 2003. VanNatta recounted that in 2002, the inmates suddenly started yelling that the guards had thrown a Qur'an on or near an Asian-style squat toilet. The guards found an inmate who admitted that he had dropped his Qur'an near his toilet. According to VanNatta, the inmate then was taken cell to cell to explain this to other detainees to quell the unrest. But the incident could partly account for the multiple allegations among detainees, including one by a released British detainee in a lawsuit that claims that guards flushed Qur'ans down toilets."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7937016/site/newsweek/
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