Case closed Newsweek's screw-up is a gift to right-wingers looking to blame the media for Bush's foreign-policy failures BY DAN KENNEDY

FOR SUPPORTERS OF George W. Bush’s disastrous foreign policy, Newsweek’s deeply flawed report that American interrogators had desecrated the Koran at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp wasn’t just another example of alleged liberal media bias. Nor was it merely about the dubious ethics of publishing a potentially explosive story on the say-so of one anonymous source. Rather, the magazine’s screw-up was a gift — a talisman that Bush’s defenders can now invoke to claim that all is well, or would be if it weren’t for those America-hating liberals and their lackeys in the press.

Consider, for instance, what happened on Monday night when Brent Bozell, president of the conservative Media Research Center, and Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas, squared off on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country. Jensen attempted to place Newsweek’s error in some context, noting that US forces are responsible for horrific abuses, including torture and homicide, at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.

Suddenly, Bozell started yipping like a dog that had finally managed to corner a wounded squirrel. "You cite me the evidence of American soldiers murdering people in prisons," he barked. Jensen, clearly perplexed, replied, "The evidence is in the Army’s own reports." That wasn’t good enough for Bozell. "You’re accusing the American military of murder. If you don’t back it up, back off," he sneered. And so it went until the segment sputtered out.

Now, I have to assume that Bozell was being outrageously disingenuous, because he’s not a stupid man. He had to know that, less than two months earlier, the Army reported that 27 prisoners were killed while in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan between August 2002 and November 2004. According to an Associated Press account, the Army had come up with sufficient evidence to charge 21 soldiers with such crimes as murder, negligent homicide, and assault. But in the new environment that Newsweek has helped to create, any accusations that American forces have acted abusively are now null and void.

This blame-the-media meme spread quickly within conservative circles. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial claiming that Newsweek’s error was part of an anti-military mindset on the part of the media that goes back to the Vietnam War. "Where the press corps goes wrong is in always assuming the worst about military and government motives," the Journal opined. The day before, Paul Marshall wrote in National Review Online, "The shakily sourced May 9 Newsweek report that interrogators had desecrated a Koran at Guantánamo Bay is likely to do more damage to the U.S. than the Abu Ghraib prison scandals." Imagine that. Charles Graner and Lynndie England must be so relieved.

Conservative bloggers, in particular, were apoplectic over the Newsweek lapse. Glenn Reynolds, whose InstaPundit.com is perhaps the most influential right-leaning blog, linked to a rant by Dean Esmay charging that "the press is not on our side in the war.... You guys are enemy propagandists. It’s just who you are. It’s nice that you’ve at least stopped pretending." Another, the increasingly prominent religious-right blogger La Shawn Barber, pushed this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, writing, "Whether Americans flushed the Koran down the toilet is irrelevant. Newsweek should not have reported it, even if true. It’s common sense, people. Those journalists knew how Muslims would react! Why would you hurt your own country and risk more deaths just to report this ‘fact’? To what end???"

To what end? Well, the truth — in this case, the truth about how Muslim detainees are being treated in the secret prison at Guantánamo Bay. It’s too bad that Barber has so little regard for that truth. Unfortunately, Newsweek’s regard for the truth was only slightly greater than hers.

ON SCARBOROUGH Country and, earlier, on Fox News’s Hannity & Colmes, Brent Bozell was quick to compare the Newsweek fiasco with CBS News’s mangled report last September on President Bush’s National Guard service in the early 1970s — a report based largely on records that appear to have been faked. That particular media scandal ended several CBS careers, including that of producer Mary Mapes, and hastened the retirement of anchor Dan Rather.

Bozell’s comparison was right on target, but not in the way he intended. For years, media outlets such as the Boston Globe had been producing credible, well-documented reports that Bush — at a minimum — had used his family connections both to get into and out of the Guard, thus avoiding Vietnam. Whether that was still a legitimate story by 2004 is debatable; but the CBS mess had the effect of shutting down any further coverage of the matter (see "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, October 1, 2004).

And so will it be with the ongoing prison-abuse scandal if the right gets its way. Judging from what we know so far, Newsweek’s lapse wasn’t nearly as serious as CBS’s, although the consequences were far worse: rioting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and throughout the Muslim world, resulting in at least 17 deaths and more than 100 injuries in Afghanistan.