Posted on 10/25/2007 7:58:45 AM PDT by Presbyterian Reporter
Shattered Diarist Ask Peter Arnett for advice next time.
It was nice to see the Scott Thomas Beauchamp/New Republic scandal back up on the radar screen yesterday. There was never a satisfactory conclusion to the story; it just faded out over the summer. Now it is back in a big way, with the Drudge Report releasing internal Army documents related to the case, and a very revealing transcript of a conversation between Beauchamp, various luminaries from The New Republic, and Beauchamps TNR-supplied lawyer.
Shattered Diarist 10/25
Divide and Concur 10/12
Osama, Take II 09/12
Not Osamas Best Work 09/08
Irans Terror Corps 08/24
Inventing Atrocities 08/10
Nordlinger: Talkin missile defense, &c.
Ledeen: Red Army Dreams
Robbins: Shattered Diarist
Editors: Unholy Mistrial
Kengor: Preserving the Party
Pacepa: Lucky Stars
Hanson: Whos Afraid of an Iranian Bomb?
Brown: Check Your Freedom at the Door
Kaza: Wishin and Hopin for a Recession
Editors: Fat Farm
Interview: Wake Up!
Editors: The Hawaiian Race
Santorum: Regime Change, Peacefully
James: Trading Down
TNRs first response to the release was typical of the tone-deafness with which they have approached the entire affair denouncing the selective leak of official documents. It is always suspect when journalists take a principled stand against leaks. It might be more convincing if TNR pledged never to use leaked information in its reporting ever again, maybe then theyd have some credibility. As it happened, the Army report recommended releasing the findings to the media, while TNR was frantically trying to get Beauchamp to cancel all his press interviews. TNR Editor Franklin Foer said that Scott owed it to the magazine to talk only to them to let them control the way the story proceeds. I suppose because they were doing such a great job of controlling it thus far.
The Beauchamp affair should be taught in journalism schools as a case study of how not to conduct damage control. When it quickly became obvious that there were serious problems both with Beauchamps diaries and with the author himself, TNR should have cut bait. The magazine could quite reasonably have made a statement that they were taken advantage of by someone they trusted, who was married to someone on their staff who presumably vouched for him, and retracted the stories. It would have been embarrassing, but the matter would have concluded. Instead TNR stood by Beauchamp, tying the magazines credibility to his, and suffering accordingly. Rather than admitting error and moving on, they invested time, money, and apparently a degree of political capital in fighting a clearly losing cause with no discernable upside even if they had prevailed. It is mystifying like Dan Rather defending those bogus National Guard documents, or Peter Arnett sticking to the story of the U.S. conducting Sarin gas attacks against captured American troops in Vietnam. How can people who are so successful make such astonishing errors in professional judgment?
Maybe TNR didnt think there was much there. Unlike the above-mentioned stories the atrocities Beauchamp claimed to have documented were unremarkable. Killing dogs? There are justifiable reasons for doing so in combat conditions if a dog with a backpack is approaching your AFV you had better take it out quickly. As well, packs of vicious or rabid dogs roaming civilian areas need to be controlled. Playing around with a skull from a mass grave? I can see bored privates doing that briefly until their platoon sergeant barked at them to knock it off and keep digging. But the thing that should have given the TNR editors pause if they had any understanding at all of military culture was the tale of mocking a disfigured woman in a mess hall in Iraq (later changed to Kuwait, but whatever, just details, right?) No solider would publicly mock a woman wounded in an attack unless he was looking for a serious ass kicking. This is not how our troops behave. The fact that this alleged incident did not raise a red flag to the TNR editors demonstrated how out of touch they are with the military or how willing they were to believe the worst about our fighting forces.
The Armys report on the Beauchamp incident is good reading and confirms what was widely believed, namely that Scott either made up or wildly exaggerated the events he described. It is a shame that all we got to see was the report itself and not the supporting documentation, especially the statements of other soldiers in Beauchamps unit. Maybe the next leak wont be as selective. But the real gold is the transcript of the telephone call, which reveals TNR was in much closer contact with Beauchamp throughout the controversy than they were willing to admit.
Poor Scott comes across as pitiable. He found out that there is a major difference between publishing sophomoric anti-military musings on his sparsely viewed blog and impugning the American Solider in a national opinion journal. [T]his whole thing its its spun out of control and mutated into something thats its just like its not something that its just insane, he said. Im basically saying, like, I basically want it to end.
Beauchamp could certainly have ended it by just admitting that his stories were fake. TNR executive editor Peter Scoblic who went out of his way to mention that he was not around the office when the stories were edited and published (did he know this was being taped?) gave Scott ample opportunity. He pointed out that the magazine stood up for Scott while they have been dragged through the mud, and nevertheless if certain parts of the story are bullshit, then well end it that way. He just asked Beauchamp to summon up some personal responsibility and be straight with them.
But why start being responsible now? Beauchamp masterfully avoids giving direct answers. He isnt talking to anyone about the articles any more. He wants to concentrate on being a Soldier. He wont talk to the media TNR included. He has an excuse for everything. He cant get the copies of the investigative documents TNR wants because hes busy. Time is different from time where you are, he states. If people think his stories arent true, well, people will view what he wrote in a lot of ways, that cant be helped. But are they true or not? Im not commenting on the stories, Beauchamp said. Thats what Im saying Im not discussing them at all. Um, which is not an admission of anything. Um, right.
It is amusing to see TNR on the receiving end of Beauchamps dissembling. Did they expect gratitude? Forget it. Scoblics frustration is evident he points out that TNR really went to the mat to defend Beauchamp and now he was lumping them in with the rest of the media. TNR did a variety of things for Beauchamp, including making sure you were okay via a number of pretty high level channels. (How high? Through whom? Interesting story there Ill bet.) When Beauchamp sloughs it all off by saying he is a Soldier and not a writer, hes going to focus on his duty to his comrades in arms, the next line from Scoblic is (Unintelligible.) Fill in the blank yourself.
It is hard to see how TNR can continue to stand by Beauchamp, or why they should. He certainly cares little about them, and the findings of the official report, leaked or not, give the magazine an opportunity to publicly recant. That is, if they can stomach agreeing with the Army. Or they could stick with the type of tactics that have brought them to their current state of disrepute; denounce the report, say the testimony was coerced, that the Soldiers involved were threatened with reprisal, that Beauchamp is too intimidated to speak, and so forth, which might find an audience with the hard-core conspiracy minded, but will only serve to keep the issue festering until the next revelation.
The bright side of the case study is in illustrating the power of the web to police reporting to act as a watchdog over the watchdogs. In particular it reconfirms the critical role of the milbloggers. A prescient, award-winning essay by Army Major Elizabeth Robbins (relation by marriage) pointed out that if members of the military were prevented from blogging, this corner of the information domain would be left to the Beauchamps of the world, where they could indulge their biases unchecked. To silence the most credible voices those at the spears edge and to deny them this function is to handicap the Army on a vital, very real battlefield, Robbins writes. The Armys reputation is maintained on many fronts, and no one fights harder on its behalf than our young Soldiers. We must allow them access to this fight. Had milbloggers not intervened, who knows what absurd, fantastic, vicious and wholly contrived events Beauchamps fourth and fifth diary entries would have contained? And how many people would have believed them?
James S. Robbins is the director of the Intelligence Center at Trinity Washington University , senior fellow for national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, and author of Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point. Robbins is also an NRO contributor.
As NRO states here, the real scoop is the transcript of the telephone conversation: "But the real gold is the transcript of the telephone call, which reveals TNR was in much closer contact with Beauchamp throughout the controversy than they were willing to admit."
TNR used to call themselves the inflight magazine of Air Force 1. Maybe, if there is a comic book section.
bttt
A modern day Aesop’s Fable.
The firestorm of skepticism and derision that met this story ought to have been a clue of some sort to any print medium remotely in touch with its audience much less with its subject. And the fact that the Army was in favor of full disclosure where the medium was attempting to stonewall is richly ironic in the view of this Vietnam antecedents of this entire genre. We truly do seem to have come full circle. Once again media "experts" have been shown to be arrogant, defiantly ignorant poseurs. Were it the first time it might be more forgivable; this wasn't even the first time in recent history for this specific magazine, this specific staff. By the third or fourth time a feller hits his thumb with a hammer one has run through sympathy and amusement to downright annoyance that he isn't smart enough to stop.
...if members of the military were prevented from blogging, this corner of the information domain would be left to the Beauchamps of the world, where they could indulge their biases unchecked.
...which is precisely what happened with regard to Vietnam coverage. You get the behavior you reward, and the only behavior being rewarded at the time both in journalism and in popular culture was stridently anti-military. There were, to be sure, honest reporters but they weren't the ones getting the Pulitzers. There were honest veterans reporting what they saw but they weren't the ones being rewarded with fame and, in the case of one John Kerry, press conferences and political careers.
The importance of the Internet in keeping a thoroughly corrupt journalistic establishment honest is difficult to exaggerate. Once the corruption has set in, once the awards committees and the hiring processes are populated by people who rode the corruption in their own career arcs, it is too late to hope for a corrective from within. Clearly no such corrective was in place in this affair. If it were we'd hardly be reading stories such as this, with more to come. This affair is far from over.
Very good line sort of "Mark Twainish."
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