The Newsweek Periscope Fiasco: Ay Carrumba!



When the State Department is in Defcon mode correcting the mistakes of a single newsweekly upon a war effort and the international reputation of the last standing hyperpower abroad, you know it's a bad week for the media in general. The Corsair feels for Newsweek's editor Mark Whittaker. When this is over, whether or not he still has his job and reputation intact, he will have considerably more gray hairs and a significantly diminished subscriber base.

Newsweek is now guilty of acting in the same manner as The White House did in the run-up to the Iraq War, namely "sexing-up" the facts to partisan advantage. Partisan politics has an aversion to finding "the truth" of any matter (Finding "the advantage" is the ultimate goal in the partisan game); partisan politics hates ideas. If you listen to Limbaugh-Hannity nexus, you'll hear such chestnuts as "pathetic," "libs," and "loser," or "what's why you lost the election," when referring to the opposition, which is always -- this is partisan politics at its idea-averse worst. If you listen to Air America at any time of the day, you will hear a quixotic array of sometimes quite cracked-sounding voices screeching about the disgusting actions at Abu Ghraib, in the telltale "I told you so" tone of voice. This also is partisan politics at its worst.

The Corsair doesn't understand this clinging to the Abu Ghraib tragedy as a political strategy. One, it is ridiculously negative. Two, Ghraib carping offers nothing by way of solution. Three, it only serves to widen the gulf between the Democratic Party and enlisted men and women, which, quite frankly, is naught else but sheer political madness. Four -- as we are now witnessing, tragically -- Ghraib Screaming serves the purposes of the enemy.

Social Scientists have coined the term "The Iron Law of Emulation," which states that organizations in conflict tend to emulate one another, the best example being the KGB and the FBI (Think: Cointelpro and the Civil Rights movement). Perhaps The Iron Law of Emulation explains why presently Newsweek, like the White House during the President's first term especially, have both had the overall effect of damaging America's reputation in the world theater.

No decent fact checker (And The Corsair was one) or editor (Guilty again) at even a fucking consumer magazine would let slip by "Koran being flushed down the toilet" without an eyewitness source's okay via phone or email. What was Newsweek thinking? Common sense also tells us that a book -- and certainly not an especially large book -- cannot be flushed down a prison toilet. This smacks of hysterical rhetoric and ought to have been dismissed as such at the outset, filed under ridiculous. Perhaps -- dare The Corsair say it? -- Newsweek wanted it to be true, so badly, in fact, that they literally assumed the worst, suspended disbelief, and, without checking the facts very carefully, ran the item anyway.

Perish the thought.

There is no way of saying how this nightmare will end. Already American flags are being burned in Pakistan and Afghanistan where they weren't being burned one moth ago. If Musharaaf is toppled by the fundamentalists in the next few months, this story will have been the prime cause. If Egypt falls to the fundamentalists over the torture issue in the near future, you know the proximate cause. Never has a media fuck up been the direct cause of turning the tide in a war situation/front (Afghanistan) already considered somewhat stabilized. More lives, and, quite possibly, more heads, will be lost over Newsweek's faulty report. There is no doubt to me at least that an editor's retraction means absolutely nothing to the ignorant fundamentalists at this point, who presently will use the article as the perfectly pitched propaganda -- the ultimate recruiting tool -- and will regard any such backtracking from up the masthead as pressure coming from the President, the same way Putin -- bizarrely -- thinks that the Administration sacked Dan Rather.

Newsweek's greatest mistake was to issue a tiny apology at the outset of the scandal. Although everyone piled on the Old Gray Lady during the Jayson Blair scandal -- which, The Corsair admits, is comparatively microcosmic -- The Times spent a tortured, monstrously introspective apologia on the paper's culpability. The Times was probably harder on itself, in a sort of Hamlet-like way, than anyone else. Newsweek should have been at least as hard on itself as The Old Gray Lady over the deaths of 16 people and God knows how many more in the future. And for that we will see apologies all week, for the rest of the month, on all the news programs from the masthead of Newsweek.

Then, after the apologies and conservative media rage are exhausted, there will be an outside panel with some respected conservative and moderate Establishment types. Some will lose their jobs, and there will be lots of slumber-inducing discussion on C-Span, heated debate on the press review shows, on panels, and in the blogosphere about "the role of the press." After the war is over, if this war even ever has a definitive end, Newsweek's fumbling will be an mild asterisk -- not scimitar -- in the history books.

Will Newsweek get the Dan Rather treatment, and, if so, who, in particular, gets the hatchet?

Whoever gets sacrificed, the cause of this particular scandal -- partisanship -- will continue to plague us. It began with the divided 2000 election, subsided for a bit after September 11, ebbed again at the Iraq War, rose when Karl Rove strategically pitted the Evangelicals against the sophisticates, and is now at its peak in the Senate -- supposedly the Platonic Eidos of compromise and gentlemanly discussion -- over filibusters. Partisanship is the mind disease of America. We are caught in its fevered grasp. And the filibuster battles beginning tomorrow will give us all a front row center seat at the Circus Maximus of Madness.