Silicon Insider: Newsweek Gets Flushed
May 19, 2005 -- -- How could Newsweek get the Koran in the Guantanamo toilet story so wrong?
Easy. Let me count the ways …
Let's leave aside for the sake of this column the obvious hypocrisy of Islamicists rioting and murdering over the rumored desecration of a copy of the Koran -- when they happily destroy and defile any Bible they get their hands on.
Let's also only briefly acknowledge that nobody at Newsweek -- or in the Bush administration, which apparently knew this story was coming -- had any idea this little throw-away item would turn into a cultural bombshell. Nor, I suspect, did you or I or the hundreds of thousands of other Newsweek readers even give it second thought ... until the riots started in Kabul.
What I do want to discuss in this column is why Newsweek (in particular, its veteran reporter Michael Isikoff) screwed up. Why it did so at the worst possible moment; with the worst possible consequences, and in the most predictable way -- and what lessons this screw-up holds for the emerging blogosphere.
I've been an investigative reporter for newspapers, and the editor of other investigative reporters for a magazine. And as I've watched the Newsweek story (and the CBS National Guard story before it) unfold, I've felt more than a little déjà vu: there, but for some great partners, good editors and some cold-blooded lawyers, went I.
Ever since Woodward and Bernstein -- maybe even since Henry Stanley and Ida Tarbell -- so-called "investigative reporting" has been the gold standard of American journalism and the aspiration of every ambitious young reporter. You sit there in the newsroom, typing out the latest dreary city council meeting or high school basketball or quarterly earnings story and you dream of breaking that big, multi-part front page story that cracks open the dark secrets of your community, pulls down the crooked big-shots, and saves innocent victims from a life of poverty and oppression. You win the Pulitzer Prize, get a private office with a door you can close, and nobody cares if you don't come into the office more than a couple times each week and don't file more than a couple stories a year -- because you are working on The Next Big One.
Indeed, there are great stories of institutional corruption, hidden crimes among the powerful and unexposed inequities out there, and thank God we have crusading journalists to expose them.
But the reality of investigative reporting is a long way from the fever dreams of cub reporters.
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