Koran stories show media at worst

Recent hand-wringing over "Koran desecration" has reached the point of being obnoxious, and in doing so it has illuminated a much larger issue - what is the "appropriate" role of the media when it comes to its relations with the U.S. military.

Certainly, we don't want the media to put a bright, sunny face on military matters around the world. We don't want propaganda newsreels from the 1940s, reporting that everything's all right. But at the same time, we don't want U.S. media acting as American bureaus for al-Jazeera, the Arab news network.

There has to be somewhere in between, where big media manages to be truthful and forthcoming, without reaching far and deep for reports that do nothing but undermine the country's efforts abroad, and more importantly, the lives of Americans who are serving overseas.

Newsweek magazine's report that a copy of the Koran had been flushed down a toilet by U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay infuriated Muslims around the world and by some accounts, fueled rioting and the deaths of from 15 to 18 people in Afghanistan.

Never mind that Newsweek retracted the story within days after concluding that its single unidentified source for Koran flushing was deemed unreliable. Never mind that the deaths and rioting that supposedly followed have not been independently confirmed to have even occurred.

The issue here is all the introspection and follow-up investigations from numerous other media outlets to determine whether there was anything - anything at all - to back up the possibility that the Koran had been somehow desecrated at a U.S. military facility.

For your average American, this story doesn't even pass the "who cares?" test. Your average American surely doesn't want to see abusive behavior of Muslim prisoners, or actions that only infuriate the enemy. So why is there such widespread concern in the American media that this might be happening?

The simple, knee-jerk answer is that it is all politically motivated by left-leaning journalists who have it out for President George W. Bush. But we think there is a more deep-seated psychology at work, one that stretches back to distrust that was generated by the way the American government managed the Vietnam War. Secret bombings over Cambodia, misleading body counts and representations of enthusiastic support among the South Vietnamese helped create an almost permanent suspicion of the U.S. military.

By the end of last week, the question of whether Koran desecration had occurred had been chatter fodder on the Internet, talk radio and among television talking heads. At some point, one could actually be duped into believing in the "seriousness" of the issue without considering that Islamic jihadists could never, ever pay for better propaganda dissemination.

If they are talking about Koran desecration so much, there might be something to these suspicions, some Jordanian street merchant with a satellite hook-up might easily conclude. And who does that help except our enemy?

We feel that the U.S. media should have no interest in isolated, purported incidents of Koran desecration. There should be interest if there is a pattern, or a policy supporting such actions, or even worse, if the U.S. military brass does nothing about it.

But journalists have a responsibility to act with thought and reason when they report sensitive news. This used to be a no-brainer, but these days the big media headline hounds are the only no-brainers left.