Part-Time Pundit: KoranGate: What did they know and when did they know it?

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May 16, 2005

KoranGate: What did they know and when did they know it?

I first got wind of the flushing Koran story at IIMPR when Naomi Klein was talking about strategic leaking and how torture is meant to cause fear and not effective at interrogation which is largely correct ( read more here). She then mentioned the flushing Koran story. My first thought was that any chump would know fear wouldn't be the reaction to a desecration like that, rage would be. If someone flushed a Bible I wouldn't be afraid that someone would grab me in the middle of the night, I'd be outraged. And that's exactly the reaction that took place. We learn that it WAS strategic leaking, but of a different kind.

Read the news here, here, here. and so on. A retraction was finally published. It was revealed that the accusation came from one solitary anonymous source who couldn't corroborate his claim. I think this guy knew full well what the reaction would be and he strategically leaked it to cause the riots and realized that Muslims would be skeptical of any backtracking. Newsweek is investigating, but just like Rathergate, heads really need to role. Dan Rather just made a false run at a sitting President with crap. This time people died because of MSM politics (as Michelle Malkin puts it Newsweek lied and people died. They're so desperate for ANYTHING, they'll run with it with shobby reporting. They'll take any accusation from any disgruntled government figure who wants to beat on the man. There needs to be a real investigation here.

This story is just another episode in a long trend of the seditious liberal media. We had the false story that all the Iraqi museums were looted only to find it was more like a few dozen pieces probably by museum workers. We found Dan Rather ran with forged documents. We find Newsweek ran with a spotty source. We had Seymour Hersh take evidence of an ongoing criminal investigation where people were already indicted and publish it in the press as breaking news. We've had plagarists and we've had circulation number embellishments.

At IIMPR people complained about the lack of trust in the media. That lack of trust has been earned by these high profile stories where it turns out the reporters lied, misrepresented, or didn't do their job. Newsweek needs to be held accountable that's why I'm asking that everyone link (i.e. Googlebomb) to Newsweek with the word "Korangate" in the title.

More here.

Posted by John Bambenek at May 16, 2005 5:26 PM