Liberals Start to Forget Newsweak Got It WrongAt least, that's my take on this
ridiculous piece by Terry Neal.
The liberal Web site Buzzflash.com has been screaming about Newsweek's retraction for a week. Liberal writer Greg Palast wrote in his blog: "But I don't want to leave out our President. His aides report that George Bush is "angry" about the report -- not the desecration of the Koran, but the reporting of it. And so long as George is angry and Condi appalled, Newsweek knows what to do: swiftly grab its corporate ankles and ask the White House for mercy."Hello? The desecration of the Koran story was false, Terry. It didn't happen. It couldn't happen, at least not as described. Try flushing a Koran down the toilet sometime and report back to us. So of course the President was angry about the report; it was a lie that led to the deaths of 18 people.
A certain and clear pattern has emerged when a damaging accusation or claim against the Bush administration or the Republican-led Congress is publicized: Bush supporters laser in on a weakness, fallacy or inaccuracy in the story's sourcing while diverting all attention from the issue at hand to the source or the accuser in the story.That's called defending yourself against phony charges, Terry. When your accuser says something fallacious or inaccurate, you point out the fallacy or inaccuracy and call into question the rest of the allegations. There's another clear and consistent pattern: The news media rushes a story because it has anti-Bush overtones, and when they get caught try to claim that it was all done in good faith.
Hilariously, he goes on:
Often this tactic involves efforts to delegitimize the entire news media based on the mistakes or sloppy reporting of a few. We saw this with the discrediting of CBS's story on irregularities in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service in the 1970s. Although the CBS "scoop" was based on faked documents, the administration's response and backlash from both conservative and mainstream media essentially relieved Bush of having to deal with the story. In other words, the allegedly "liberal" media dropped the story like a hot rock.The allegedly "liberal" media dropped the story because they had been pursuing it for years like Ahab after the white whale. The memo story was the first new lead on the case since 2000; when it turned out to be a dry hole they decided that Abu Ghraib-type stories were the only remaining club with which to beat Bush.
