Another black eye for big media

If you were superstitious, you would have to think maybe someone had cast a spell on big media in the United States.

Two years ago, there was a scandal at the New York Times. It seemed like a big deal at the time, but so many bad things have happened since then that no one even remembers the trouble that led to a shakeup in the editorial staff there.

But when Dan Rather put his foot in his mouth last September, everyone was paying attention. That after all is the nature of television. You can't help but see what's right in front of your face, and Rather was caught trying to dance the Texas Two-Step (two steps backwards, one step out of sight) when his "expose" of President Bush's National Guard service turned out to include fabricated memos.

It seemed at the time like a wake-up call for the national media to pay attention, be fair, connect the dots, check the sources, double-check the sources and - above all - be accurate.

But after watching Newsweek squirm for the last week, what we now know is that some members of the national media were asleep during the wake-up call.

The news magazine published a throwaway story in its May 9 issue that claimed that an American interrogator at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Quran down the toilet as part of a pattern of harassment of Muslim detainees. In particular, Newsweek alleged that the claim about the Quran had been substantiated by the U.S. military, something it turns out there was no credible evidence for.

Getting the story wrong was bad enough, but then the story was disseminated worldwide by the Muslim media, spurring violent protests in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries. More than a dozen people died as a result.

Now we won't go so far as to blame Newsweek for those deaths. Muslim fundamentalists have to take responsibility for their own evils, and they can't get off the hook with a "Newsweek made me do it" defense.

But we have to think the incident points up a continuing confusion in the mainstream media about responsibility.

After all, Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker admitted that the magazine had made a mistake, but then he couldn't quite bring himself to see how a mistake of this magnitude damages the credibility not just of his magazine, not just of the mainstream media, but indeed of every journalist everywhere.

Whitaker, who did not see the article before it was published, said: "So far as we can tell, everybody in the reporting process conducted themselves professionally" and that reporter Michael Isikoff and the magazine "went by the book."

Unfortunately, that sends exactly the wrong signal to a public that is desperate for accurate, fair reporting.

Mistakes will happen, but let's make sure that we are all on the same page about what is professional behavior for journalists. There is never any excuse for being wrong, and there is no excuse for making excuses.