The Beeb's John Simpson looks at the Newsweek/Koran debacle.

Here's Newsweek's official explanation.

I also comment on blogosphere reaction.

Some excerpts:

The pressure was on Newsweek to retract its report. The magazine checked with its source - a senior US official - who confirmed that he had come across references to the mistreatment of the Koran in the results of an US investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo.

But he was no longer certain that they had come from the specific report he had originally named.

This was immediately greeted in the US as a sign that Newsweek had backed down, though nothing in the Newsweek statement indicated that it had.

Simpson went on to note that there are documented cases of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo, and that in any event, this wasn't even the first time the Koran allegation has come up.

So should Newsweek have reported the Koran allegation, given its inflammatory nature? It looks very much as though the magazine's editors had no idea that it would be taken up so widely, or cause so much trouble.

And what about al-Jazeera? Should it have rebroadcast it, knowing how fiercely the allegation would be received by Muslims around the world?

Media under fire

The weakness of the story lies, as the Pentagon spotted immediately, in the vagueness of its sourcing, though Newsweek was perfectly clear that the source was an official who had seen the detail about the Koran in an official report.

With hindsight, perhaps, the magazine would have been more comfortable if it had had more details. But it did not try to deceive its readers about the story.

Yet since this was by no means the first time that allegations of the desecration of the Koran by US guards and interrogators have emerged, Newsweek may not have been as concerned as it might otherwise have been.

Simpson said al-Jazeera was just doing its job.

The blogosphere

The reaction of U.S. conservatives in the blogosphere has been predictably apoplectic.

Here's a quote from anti-Strib:

Newsweek has since ran an apology, but stopped short of retracting the story. WHY? If there was a portion of this story that isn't true, shouldn't it be the duty of the editor to retract? Calm some nerves around the world? This is going to get more american's killed, but why should the media give a rip? If there were ever proof positive that the media has an agenda, this is it people.

From Dean's World:

Furthermore, if we ever had any doubts that the press is not on our side in the war, that it is anxious to publish stories of failure and doom and rarely cares to look at our successes (many of them utterly historic), well, Michael Isikoff John Barry and the Newsweek editorial team have finally laid them to rest. You guys are enemy propagandists. It's just who you are. It's nice that you've at least stopped pretending.

This is also still further proof that the notion that "professional" journalists have greater fact-checking or "checks and balances" than responsible bloggers is nonsense.

Screw you, Newsweek. Screw you.

I could spend all day on blogosphere reaction, but if you want to see more, search on 'newsweek' at Technorati.

Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker wrote:

Before deciding whether to publish it we approached two separate Defense Department officials for comment. One declined to give us a response; the other challenged another aspect of the story but did not dispute the Qur'an charge.

Why didn't those officials red-flag the Koran allegations?

More from Whitaker:

Although other major news organizations had aired charges of Qur'an desecration based only on the testimony of detainees, we believed our story was newsworthy because a U.S. official said government investigators turned up this evidence. So we published the item.

From my perspective, the story hasn't been proven wrong yet, but it is clearly on wobbly legs. As I said in my earlier post, if Newsweek was going with one source, they should have asked for some documentary evidence too.

The U.S. military is maintaining it has no documented cases of its personnel desecrating the Koran.

Even more from Whitaker:

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur'an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them "not credible." Our original source later said he couldn't be certain about reading of the alleged Qur'an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.

What makes this more complex is this particular story might be wrong in terms of what document contained the allegation, but the allegation itself might be true.

A couple other points:

1. One thing that could make the desecration allegations more believable to the Muslim world is the appalling way Muslim prisoners were handled, most notoriously at Abu Ghraib, but also at other facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I really must refresh my memory as to how conservatives reacted to those revelations.

2. Why do conservatives attack an MSM media outlet for possibly getting something wrong but support the Bush administration for taking America to war in Iraq under false pretences (WMDs, terror links)?

3. Anyone remember Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who made some nasty anti-Muslim remarks to U.S. evangelical Christian organizations? Did conservative bloggers attack him over that? After all, those remarks could be seen as putting American lives at risk. And certainly, when there are claims of Koran desecration, the utterances of people like Boykin aren't going to help the U.S. get the benefit of any doubt.