Mark Steyn: Nice Goin’, Guys [Newsweek is much easier to flush]

To us old Fleet Street hands, Michael Isikoff will always be the guy who lost the Monica scoop. He had the Lewinsky story first, but his bosses at Newsweek killed it at the last minute. They wanted more sources, more corroboration: It’s all very well having presidential DNA on the intern’s cocktail dress, but we really need a second stain on a second dress before it would be responsible to run this thing. If you can’t get a second dress, the Columbia Journalism School Book of Media Ethics says it’s okay to make do with a cashmere sweater, as long as it’s in an approved pastel shade (the sweater, not the stain). The point is, on a big scoop like this, we need to get everything nailed down airtight, even if that means we don’t break it until, oh, somewhere round the middle of Al Gore’s second term.

So Isikoff lost his story, and Drudge broke it instead and made his name. Flash-forward seven years to the spring of 2005: Isikoff is still at work at Newsweek, possibly still working on trying to nail down his Monica scoop. Suddenly, “a knowledgeable U.S. government source” tips him off on a hot story: At Guantanamo Bay, interrogators got prisoners to talk by flushing a copy of the Koran down the toilet. Like all stories, this scoop immediately went through the full, exhaustive, ultra-rigorous Newsweek editing process. Thus, the spelling of “Koran” was changed to the more culturally sensitive “Qur’an.” A senior editor then took a further look at the controversial story and said, “Hmm. I dunno. Shouldn’t it be ‘Qu’ran’? Or maybe ‘Q’u’r-an’? I’d be happier if we could get a couple of extra apostrophes in there . . .”

And then they ran the story. And, as we now know, it sparked riots in Pakistan and elsewhere that left 15 people dead. And, unlike the fact-checked-to-death Monica story, the Qu’ran-down-the-to’ilet story turned out to be — what’s the word? — untrue.

As should have been obvious even to Isikoff and his colleagues. Is it possible to flush a Koran down the toilet? It takes a bit of effort to get even an average issue of Newsweek down and round the bend. I tried flushing Michael Isikoff’s Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story down there and wound up getting water all over my wingtips and squelching off in my socks to call a plumber. And Isikoff’s book is only 416 pages. My copy of the Q’u’r’an is 950 pages, though if you reduce the apostrophes you can get it down under 800. The suras-down-the-septic story was an obvious crock. All it had going for it was that the magazine wanted it to be true.

“It’s important to remember,” Isikoff told the Washington Post, “there was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards here.” And that’s true. The fake Koran-flushing lives up entirely to the CBS bogus National Guard memos: an honest mistake that, like all the mainstream media’s honest mistakes, is a mistake that will, if true, damage the Bush administration. By contrast, when the Swiftvets come along, whoa, hold your horses, let’s get the slo-mo fact-checkers in for three or four months, at least until, say, mid-November. The only difference this time around is that there seems to be some serious damage to America’s reputation in parts of the Muslim world otherwise well disposed to the Great Satan — Afghanistan notably — and the little matter of 15 corpses, which makes Michael Isikoff considerably more lethal than, say, Lynndie England.

The rules for this sort of thing are well known. Last year, an old leftie Scots pal of mine, Alistair Beaton, wrote an anti-war “satire” which included Bush and Blair singing “We’re Sending You a Cluster Bomb from Jesus.” Ha-ha. Alistair’s play opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in England and did boffo biz. In his merciless evisceration of Bush-Blair and the radical Christian threat to world peace, Alistair was operating in the tradition of bold, courageous, transgressive artists without whom a free society cannot survive. And happily, crazy as they are, these Christian fundamentalist types don’t tend to be waiting for you at the stage door. Whereas, if you write, “We’re Sending You a Schoolgirl Bomb from Allah,” you attract a somewhat livelier crowd, and it’s hard to pick up showbiz awards for your boldness, courage, transgressiveness, etc., when you’re six feet under. Ask Theo van Gogh. As a rule, if you’re going to be “provocative,” it’s best to do it with people who can’t be provoked.

Journalists understand this, too. When Christians get hot and bothered about a horny Jesus (The Last Temptation of Christ), a gay Jesus (Terrence McNally’s Broadway play Corpus Christi), or a Jesus floating in the artist’s urine (Piss Christ), columnists take to the barricades to champion the cause of free speech. When Muslim groups closed down a play in Cleveland because its revolting apologia for a Palestinian suicide bomber was insufficiently pro-Muslim, the silence of the media lambs was deafening.

But somehow, when it’s the merest hint of a rumor of a canard about Bush stooges flushing the Koran down the toilet, Newsweek doesn’t bother thinking through the consequences. That’s the real problem here: not the reflex leftism but the pathetic hicky parochialism of a U.S. media unable to see things except through the tunnel vision of domestic partisan advantage. Who’s really the “culturally insensitive” ones here?

These days it's the readers of pablum like NEWSREEK who must be the fact-checkers. Since they don't bother to vet their own story's as long as they blame the Bush admin.

Every word must be checked, including "and" and "the".

The problem with Newsweek is that the paper is too slick to wipe with.

It's not suitable for wiping, but you can pee on it just fine.

The suras-down-the-septic story was an obvious crock.

Which proves the superiority of the old time Out-house. If you could get a Sears-Roebuck Catalog down it you could get almost anything down it.

Traveling salesman once drove on our farmyard selling Watkins Rx products. Asked if he could use our Out-house. Dad pointed to the path behind the smokehouse and said feel free.

We waited quite a while and he didn't return. Dad sent to go see if he "fell in." I walked on back there, and he was "fishing" around down the hole with a cotton-hoe. I asked him what he was doing, and he explained he had dropped his coat down the hole. I told him the coat wasn't going to be any good once he got it out. But then he told he needed it because his lunch was in the pocket.

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