Beauchamp Mirrors Glass: New Republic, same old story
by Daniel Clark

Already infamous for the fictitious reporting of Stephen Glass, The  New Republic has done it again. This time, the magazine has run a  series of dubious narratives from Iraq, written by an American soldier  named Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

To say the least, Beauchamp's portrayals of our soldiers are not  flattering. In one story, several of them ridicule a woman who had  been severely disfigured by an IED. In another, a soldier removes part  of a child's skull from a mass grave, and wears it on his head for an  entire day to amuse his buddies. A third features a soldier who roams  about in a Bradley fighting vehicle, running over dogs for sport.

Each of these accounts contains details that have been thoroughly  debunked by military bloggers. As a result, TNR has promised,  belatedly, to conduct an investigation. The shame of it is that the  additional damage done to the magazine's reputation is so unnecessary.  If only its editors had observed the method by which their peers in  the liberal media publish their own falsehoods, the looming scandal 
would have been averted.

Take, for example, two of the stories that had dominated the news  during the past month, both of which were speculative pieces about  government reports that had yet to be released. First, an anonymous  source cited by the Associated Press claimed that a report would  conclude that "the surge" in Iraq had failed. Several days later,  another AP story said that a different soon-to-be-released government 
report had found that al-Qaeda is stronger now than ever before.

Like Beauchamp's accounts, these stories were so blatantly  counterintuitive that they should have set off alarm bells in  newsrooms across the country. At the very least, any responsible  editor would have shelved the stories until the releases of the actual  reports (which, predictably, contradicted the media's widely published  expectations). Instead, not only did most major newspapers put the 
false projections on the front page, but they saw no reason to retract  and apologize for them when proven wrong.

Where TNR gets itself into trouble is in letting its liars be the  authors of its stories, instead of merely being sources. If some other  reporter had related Beauchamp's narratives second-hand, then at least  it could be said to be true that Beauchamp had made those claims. When  his tales were found to have been fabricated, the magazine would have 
had plausible deniability.

This rationale holds even if neither the source nor his claim has any  credibility whatsoever. For example, you could just as soon suck an  olive through a straw as flush a Quran down a toilet, but when a  prisoner at Guantanamo Bay charged that our guards had done the  latter, Newsweek passed along his accusation without cynicism.

That was just one of the more egregious examples in which unreliable  or anonymous sources have been used to spread enemy propaganda through  the American media. The AP's more subtle method of leaking information  that discredits our war effort, but later turns out to be inaccurate,  has become nearly as ubiquitous as articles about steroids in baseball.

The role of a source used to be to provide information, the veracity  of which the reporter would then determine through corroboration. In  today's activist media, however, a source is simply a mechanism  through which reporters and editors can project their own biases,  without holding themselves accountable. In the same way that network  screeners determine which questions "the people" may ask at a town 
hall debate, liberal publications can always come up with a source who  will say things that fit into their template, even if that source  needs to be invented.

Thus, a source has come to play the role of an imaginary friend. For  journalists to deny responsibility for this most recent spate of phony  war reporting is like an only child standing next to a broken lamp and  saying, "Waldo did it." If the child's parents -- who in this case are  the rest of the self-policing media -- are willing to accept the  existence of Waldo, then the child is off the hook.

It is considerably more difficult for them to look the other way when  the child botches his own defense, as TNR has just done. The editors  have let Beauchamp relate his phony stories as first-hand accounts,  without plausible deniability even by current media standards. It's as  if the child has assumed his imaginary friend's identity, and told his  parents, "My name's Waldo, and I just broke your lamp."
 

Daniel Clark is a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance. The New  Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers,  journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
 

Place Your ad here!