Word: newsweek
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News professionals around the country were somewhat hesitant last week to second-guess Newsweek's editorial judgments. They don't need to be told that even the most conscientious among them can make an error. But many believe the magazine made a series of questionable judgments that together led it into trouble...
...thing, Newsweek's "Periscope" section, which features newsy tidbits, is scrutinized less closely than the rest of the magazine. Whitaker conceded last week that because those items are short and often develop late in the week, "there are one or two layers of editing and review that are not there," compared with articles elsewhere in the magazine. That's no excuse, says Daniel Okrent, who just ended an 18-month stint as "public editor"--basically, the internal critic--of the New York Times. "It doesn't say at the top of that page 'Stuff that we didn't check...
...Newsweek was also playing with fire by relying on a single, anonymous source to support such a provocative claim. In this case, the source was presuming to describe a still unpublished report that neither the Newsweek correspondent nor the source possessed. "You're trying to predict what's going to be in a document that hasn't yet been written," says Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. "If you have one source who says, 'I'm sitting in an office right now looking at the report,' and then they read you the page, then...
...their stories why a source has declined to go on the record. Says Leonard Downie Jr., the Post's executive editor: "Then the readers can judge for themselves what to make of that information, the sources' motivation and our effort to get that information on the record." Whitaker says Newsweek is now strengthening its guidelines, adding: "We will have something to say about that very soon...
...raise objections to the Koran allegation. The Defense Department's silence, however, didn't amount to confirmation. "There's a famous scene in the book All the President's Men," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and former chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek. "Bernstein says to a source, 'If I count to whatever, and you stay on the phone and don't say anything, then I know the story is right.' Well, that's the story Woodward and Bernstein got wrong in Watergate...