The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal lead editorial this morning discusses the horrendous (mendacious? Tendentious?) Newsweek reporting which, when you break it right down, seems to be about right, according to the editorial.
Unfortunately, “about right” to most in the media means wrong—on so many levels—to adherents of facts.
The more consequential question here, it seems to us, is why Newsweek was so ready to believe the story was true. The allegation after all repudiated explicit U.S. and Army policy to treat Muslim detainees with religious respect, including time to pray, honoring dietary preferences and access to the Koran. Yet the magazine readily printed a story suggesting that what our enemies claim about Guantanamo is essentially true. Why?
Our own answer is that this is part of a basic media mistrust of the military that goes back to Vietnam and has shown itself with a vengeance during the Iraq conflict and the war on terror. Long gone are the days when AP’s Ernie Pyle—an ace reporter by the standards of any era—could use the pronoun “we” in describing the Allied struggle against the Axis. In its place is a kind of permanent adversary media culture that goes beyond reporting the war news—good or bad as it should—and tends to suspect the worst about the military and American purposes.
[…] We have all been reading a great deal lately about both the decline of media credibility, and the decline of both TV news viewership and newspaper circulation. Any other industry looking at such trends would conclude that perhaps there is a connection. Certainly a press corps that wants readers to forgive its own mistakes might start by showing a little more respect and understanding for the men and women who risk their lives to defend the country.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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