Never Mind
The big story for the mainstream media circus today is that Newsweek retracted a story which enflamed the muslim world. Apparently, an anonymous government source now says that he isn't sure where he saw the report stating that Korans were flushed down the toilet. Their retraction was, "Whoops, sorry about all those people who died. Our bad."This thing reaks like "memogate" though. The right wing has been wanting to take Dan Rather out of commission since the Nixon administration. He was set up, plain and simple. Those forged documents came from somewhere. Somone wanted to discredit him, so they set him up. Sucessfully.
Never mind all the damning evidence in the story that was true and accurate, the story became "memogate" (which I'm using quotes for because I hardly consider it worth a "gate"). Of course, if it were a story about a draft-dodging democrat president who was absent from "mandatory" military training, you just know that Fox "news" and the conservative media machine would have been all over it.
I'm not saying that that Newsweek was necessarily set up, but there is something else going on here. Maybe the anonymous source was threatened. Maybe Newsweek was threatened. I don't know, so I'm not going to venture a guess. I'm will say that I am very skeptical, as are many other people in the world. At any rate, the right wing is seizing on this to distract people from the real issue.
Of course, I'm not exonerating Newsweek, Dan Rather, and mainstream media in America. Things are a dismal state of affairs, without question. In these cases and others, they were just sloppy. It's not about bias, it's about shoddy journalism. The right wing is flooding the blogosphere and beyond with denunciations of the "liberal" media right now. The story became Newsweek retracting a story because of one paragraph. Never mind all the horrific parts of the story that are utterly true, or all the other reports of ongoing abuse at Guantanamo Bay. If the media were liberal, the story would be the human rights abuses and other atrocities being commited in the name of spreading freedom and democracy.
(UPDATE: Check out this story from the US Department of State website. Army generals have said that the Newsweek story was not necessarily what ignited the political violence in Afghanistan. I think this justifies my suspicions. I'll bet a thousand dollars that the State Department's article doesn't get any coverage, but Newsweek's retraction will continue to be the focus. Any takers?)
posted by Skrambled Egghead Reborn @ 7:00 PM
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