• by May 19, 2005

PERISCOPE DOWN - This just in: A well-placed source tells the Riff that subscribers are flushing their Newsweek renewal offers - and the last vestiges of American journalistic credibility - down the toilet. Oops! Wait. What's that? Oh, it seems our source wasn't all that sure about the toilet-flushing incident. Never mind.

Actually, it seems it's not so easy to forget Newsweek's admission that it inadvertently published a story about an alleged desecration of the Koran - the holiest of Islamic scriptures - by soldiers trying to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without first confirming the facts. And even though Mark Whitaker, editor of the Washington Post Co. magazine, has issued a retraction of the story, it didn't happen until after murderous riots erupted throughout the Islamic world.

"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay," wrote Whitaker. That's it? No apology to the Islamic people who were outraged by the report, or those who died in the riots? Well, based on what we know, we've just lost a lot of esteem for Newsweek, a publication we ordinarily would defend and place on a journalistic pillar.

It seems we are not alone. "Newsweek In The Blogosphere," a report released today by blog researcher Cymfony, finds that some of America's most vocal population was outraged as well.

"The reaction to the continuing Koran/Quran desecration controversy across the blogosphere has been immense," finds the report, "By May 17th, there were already over 2,000 postings about the story, and the number is continuing to grow rapidly."

The main themes detected by Cymfony's analysis of the blog discussions, not surprisingly, included:

" Credibility/Trust
" Bias
" Profit
" Reporting timeliness
" Journalistic independence

The opinions fell primarily into four camps:

" People who believe Newsweek published the story in an act of liberal bias against the Bush Administration.
" People who believe Newsweek published an accurate story, but later caved into White House pressure.
" People who don't care if Newsweek was wrong about the story, because the Bush Administration has created an atmosphere that makes the story believable.
" People who believe Newsweek acted out of profit motives, and simply wanted to sell more magazines.

Here's a sampling of verbatim blog postings representing the divergent spectrum:

"Newsweek is a left wing anti American rag. They hate Bush, and will do or say anything including sabotaging the military if they think it would make Bush or the right look bad." - anti-strib.blogspot.com

"To which we might add, "He who controls the U.S. government controls Newsweek. And so yesterday in good Orwellian fashion, Newsweek has taken its May 1 news item  about interrogators at Guantanamo flushing a Koran down a toilet  and flushed it down the memory hole, sort of." - huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/james-pinkerton

"Let's face it, Newsweek wouldn't have any Koran flushing incidents if you didn't have the Guantanamo Bay torture center prison and Abu Ghraib." - mgrant8.blogspot.com

"This whole thing was started to sell magazines, not because Newsweek was upset over the treatment of the koren [sic]. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would say they printed the report to generate more news(slow news days suck and bloodshed sells)." - www.skipjack.info