Flushing Newsweek

  It’s really funny how things always come around. It can take a really, really long time, but it always does.

I bet many people think I’m distraught at the whole Newsweek scandal over the questionable-at-best account of U.S. interrogators flushing Korans down the toilet. Distraught because perhaps some imagined liberal media hero of mine got shot down.

They would be wrong.

First off, I let my Newsweek subscription — at the low, low professional discount, no less — lapse several months ago because I was sick and tired of all the lengthy glowing cover stories about how wonderful and brave and smart the current president is.

Newsweek never believed any of that fluff they wrote about Bush. He had just won the election and they were just sucking up. To me that’s worse than being a bad journalist. That’s being a good journalist who intentionally does bad work.

So Newsweek continues — six months later — to beg me by mail to resubscribe. I trash everything they send to me gleefully.

As for the recent destroying of the mag’s reputation by this anonymously sourced Koran story, consider who wrote said anonymously sourced story: One Michael Isikoff, who wrote another famously anonymously sourced story a few years back.

You might remember the story. It involved an intern and a president. It involved multiple anonymous sources, all with massive conflicts of interest and more often than not enormous funding from the right wing.

Isikoff couldn’t be bothered to get reputable sources on the record then, and he can’t be bothered about it now.

As for the larger issue, I tend to agree with what the gay British Republican says:

The fact that the Koran story was immediately so believable to so many people around the world says volumes about how poor America’s reputation is around the world now.

And that part’s not Newsweek’s fault at all. We know whose it is.

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