Word: newsweek
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Journalists strive to be influential. But there can't be many who would hope to affect events the way Newsweek has in Afghanistan. The anti-American street protests that erupted there earlier this month--after the magazine reported that a Pentagon investigation would support claims that guards at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet--left as many as 17 dead and scores injured...
...turned out, Muslim sensibilities and the U.S.'s image were not the only casualties. Even after retracting the Koran claim, Newsweek found itself in the center of the storm. In a note to the magazine's readers last week, editor Mark Whitaker said the report had been based on information from "a knowledgeable U.S. government source." But, he went on, that source was no longer certain that he had read about the alleged incident in the still unreleased Pentagon report. As Whitaker explained, the source now said that "it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts...
...piled on too. White House press secretary Scott McClellan urged the magazine to help undo the damage to the U.S.'s image by pointing out ways in which "our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care." Newsweek wasn't the only media outlet feeling the heat. By inevitable extension, journalism in general was back under a shadow, its reputation already scuffed by a series of incidents, including the Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times, the fall of Jack Kelley at USA Today, the dubious National...
Those of us who are feeling nauseous about the recent scapegoating of Newsweek would like to say we can’t believe that the government is getting away with such a dystopian shenanigan, but in fact, we can believe it. Of course it’s easier to blame some maverick reporter for screwing things up than to accept that the ruling structure of our great nation might actually be rotten to the core. Like Anakin did, Americans are seizing on the small errors of the few instead of the overarching wrongs of the powerful...
...meaning [to Christians] of that revelation unfolds in the events of his life as described in the Gospels," writes comparative religion expert F.E. Peters in his book The Monotheists, in Islam the Koran "is the revelation." To say, as Georgetown University Islam expert John Voll does, that Newsweek's account portrayed Americans "flushing God down the toilet" might seem extreme. But Voll suggests that a sense of the offense involved can be extrapolated from pious Christians' horror at artist Andres Serrano's 1987 Piss Christ, a photograph of a plastic crucifix immersed in urine...