Sunday, May 15, 2005 |
23:49 - Blood on the pages
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1116217489.shtml
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Dean is right: Newsweek is squarely to blame for all the deaths and injuries and intimidations that have resulted and have yet to result from their eager repeating of an anonymous report of Guantanamo Bay guards flushing the Koran down the toilet.
The only thing Dan Rather hurt in his fake-news scandal was George Bush's reputation, which is about like saying he's responsible for harming the popularity of 8-track players. But Newsweek has gotten people killed.
Something they would have known if they'd spent more time reading LGF instead of thinking up new ways to belittle religious people or misinterpret technology news is that a whole lot of the Islamic world already believes that Americans are responsible for nonstop crimes against Muslims that are just getting hushed up by the Zionist media; this is simply a long-awaited and long-expected "documented" case of it. For Newsweek to tell the real story now—that the Koran-flushing incident in question was a prank by an inmate trying to clog up the toilet with the only flushable thing in his cell—would be an exercise in futility and more fuel on the fire, whereas if they'd told it that way originally it would only have gone unnoticed. (And they'd have sold less copies, probably, so there you go.) And just as the Egyptian experts examining that EgyptAir crash a few years back where the black box showed the pilot muttering prayers just before sending the plane into a deliberate dive into the ocean insisted that the pilot would never commit suicide because Muslims just don't do that, there will be nothing Newsweek can say or do to make the people who believe their original story was accurate change their minds. They know the truth; any attempt to deny it now would just be a cover-up, and further proof of the Americans' nefarious complicity. Especially if they had the audacity to try to say that Muslims—Muslims—were the ones desecrating the Koran. It'd just make them madder.
If Newsweek had any sense of the stakes involved in the global PR campaign that is the War on Terror, they'd be steering clear of these matters where they're clearly not qualified to treat sensitive news with the delicacy it deserves and requires, and spending their writers' precious time instead on more lavish cover stories about how Y chromosomes and bottled water cause cancer.
I sure am glad I let my subscription lapse a few months ago.
UPDATE: Well, yes, perhaps the bigger problem—globally speaking—is that we have to be this careful about stuff like this.
It's the 21st century, and we did away with anti-flag-burning laws. Your turn.
UPDATE: So according to Glenn and one of Austin Bay's on-the-scene correspondents, Newsweek has managed to turn what has been by all accounts a spectacular political success in Afghanistan over the past three years into "a total disaster"?
I'm starting to want to see some hangings for treason here. I wonder if we can get Newsweek to foot the bill for the Afghanistan campaign to date, since they don't seem to have cared about pissing it all away in the name of scoring some cheap points in yet another flagrant abuse of the freedom we give the press in time of war these days.
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