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Admin note: The Big Picture will be taking a break for most of this week. We’ll be back on Saturday, May 21. Have a great week!
This story about mainstream media is surely the most appalling in many years. This is far beyond anything Jayson Blair did. This resulted in serious harm to many people and to the United States.
WASHINGTON, May 16 (Reuters) – The White House said on Monday that a Newsweek report based on an anonymous source had damaged the U.S. image overseas by alleging that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay.
The May 9 report triggered several days of rioting in Afghanistan and other countries in which at least 16 people were killed.
Newsweek’s editor, Mark Whitaker, apologized to the victims on Sunday and said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet.
“It’s puzzling that while Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refused to retract the story,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “I think there’s a certain journalistic standard that should be met and in this instance it was not.”
The report sparked violent protests across the Muslim world—from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan, Indonesia and Gaza. In the past week the reported desecration was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.
MSM has departed so far from reality, and has become so obsessed—for no reason—with making the U.S. look bad, that in this case great harm was done, without any possible excuses regarding the public’s “right to know.” The story was false.
I would like to suggest that even if it were true, it would still have been a great error for Newsweek to print it. It’s a triviality. We wouldn’t care if the Bible had been treated in a similar way. Yet printing the story led to terrible harm to Muslims and to America. Newsweek was wrong to print the story even when they thought it was true.
Okay, this is pretty far out there.
Somebody at Google has a sense of humor.
Could it be that there’s somebody with Conservative views there?
I’m getting a screen shot of this right now, because I don’t think it’s going to last.
(Hat Tip to Geoff Lancaster.)
I had lunch with Luke Thompson today, and I’m happy to say he is in good health. His doctors say he has to take it easy for a few weeks; that’s all he has to do to complete his recovery. And congrats to Luke on his LA Press Club nomination for Best Weblog.
We talked about films, of course, and since he’s seen Star Wars Episode III, we got around to that one. He liked it a lot. He mentioned that there’s a couple of lines in it that he sees as a slam at GWB. These lines don’t give away any plot twists or surprises, but just in case…
...SPOILER SPACE: TWO LINES OF STAR WARS DIALOG COMING UP…
Luke mentioned that a bad guy in the film says, “You’re either with us or against us.” And the response is, “Only the Sith deal in absolutes!”
It bugged me that Lucas put a dumb slam against GWB in the middle of this film. But it bugged me even more that he would put a dumb slam against absolute statements in it. Kids are impressionable and some of them will try to take this stuff seriously, which would be to their detriment. For example, the speed of light is an absolute, and if the Jedi don’t know about that, they’re putting themselves at a disadvantage.
But the classic response to such an argument is: “Only the Sith deal in absolutes? That’s about as absolute a statement as you can get.”
