Actually, it’s not your argument I’m concerned about, it’s TNR’s. Because if Beauchamp was incommunicado for so long, how was he able to set up those interviews with both the Washington Post and Newsweek?
Seems like some communication would have had to take place for that to occur.
Brian Williams has a oddly shaped face.
I don’t know anything about those (non-)interviews besides what you’ve posted here. You’re on your own.
FWIW, last week TNR said:
Underlining mine. Since your argument is with TNR, I’ll let you figure out whether they’re reliable on this point - I’m just quoting.
Do you find them reliable on that point? You are skeptical of much else that they write about.
If you have an argument to make, make it.
You don’t need to ask me a question about a digression from an irrelevance in order to do so.
Besides, what you’re asking me about? I don’t fucking care. Maybe it’s reliable, maybe it isn’t. I can’t come up with a reason for it to matter to me.
You’re on your own. Say what you say.
As for me, I have only this to add:
Purple cows love ice cream.
I’m bumping this mess because TNR has finally retracted the Beauchamp stories.
I think retraction overstates their action by a considerable bit:
In the context of the entire article, I’m perfectly willing to view the Beuachamp pieces as “war stories” and to not attach too much credence to them. On the other hand, I am hardly given confidence in anything emanating from the U.S. Army or its information wing, (or Drudge or the rest of the Right Wing bloggers and pundits) either.
Observations about the other TNR. (This time regarding an actual reporter, not a blogging stringer.) 
Freelancer, actually, and the articles in question appeared on National Review Online. So there doesn’t appear to be much of a distinction there, frankly.
A magazine stands by what it prints or it doesn’t, no matter who writes the stuff.
I’ve now read all 14 pages of the New Republic’s account of their investigation. Is there something in there that strikes you in particular as undermining Beauchamp’s credibility, or are you just doing a victory dance?
Because it looks to me like TNR is saying that, other than Beauchamp placing one story in the a mess hall in the wrong country, there’s a ton of corroboration of his stories, but between that mental misplacement and the fact that they’d like some more corroboration that they haven’t been able to get, they’re not standing behind them - but unless I’m misreading journalistic code, they’re not retracting them either.
It appears to me that they could very well have chosen to stand behind his account, but made a judgment call not to continue to do so.
Meanwhile, you show much greater sympathy for a right-wing reporter who fucked up, but the nature of whose fuckup you continue to minimize - as does the National Review.
It says in Deuteronomy: “You shall not have unequal weights in your bag, one heavy, the other light. You shall not have unequal measures in your house, one large, the other small.”
Well, I do think there are differences there.
For one, the editors of National Review haven’t arrogantly suggested that questions about the article are motivated by ideology. They haven’t attacked the people who questioned the stories in any way, from what I can see.
That’s quite a difference from what The New Republic did.
Look, publications make mistakes. It happens, and it would be silly to suggest that this sort of thing is avoidable. To a great degree this can be minimized, sure, but Jason Blair, Stephen Glass, Mary Mapes, and Janet Cooke still happened, didn’t they?
And the venerable New York Times publishes corrections nearly every single day. To a great extent that is due to a desire to be comprehensive - the more details you have, the more you have to go wrong.
The issue for me is what a publication does in the near term when a problem is discovered and what they do to mend their system afterward. I won’t comment on the National Review here - I’ll save that for the thread devoted to such. But The New Republic screwed up - they let a soldier write for them in the first place, knowing full well that that could well conflict with his responsibilities to the media, they let him publish under a pseudonym, which made his articles difficult to check, and they let his wife do the fact checking - a pretty clear conflict of interest.
And all of this was done with the Glass case in fairly recent memory, which means that The New Republic should have been fairly aware both of their responsibilities here and of the consequences of failure.
When questions were raised, they attacked the messenger, stonewalled for months, threatened Beauchamp in a phone call, and finally covered their asses right before presidential election coverage was to ramp up. Sorry, but I don’t think that can be defended much.
From the link:
I made comments above about the roles of soldier and journalist being incompatible at the same time, and commented also that many of the stories sounded like battlefield legends to me.
Seems like a similar conclusion was drawn by Foer after all these months of investigating, doesn’t it?
How does that affect the underlying in/accuracy of the original reporting, or your response to it?
So IOW, you are going to dodge your differing treatment of the two publications, even when they differ especially greatly with respect to “the issue for [you].”
Fine, then. You went after TNR and Beauchamp from Day One, and not just on the issue of whether it’s appropriate for a soldier to publish his musings on life in a combat zone while he’s still there. But with respect to NRO, you take a much softer approach. You want to know why their reporter is a fabulist. Like it matters, when they don’t kick his butt off their publication.
And there you have it. How did TNR deal with it? They conducted a long investigation, shared their results in great detail, took responsibility for specific choices of theirs, and ended their working relationship with Beauchamp. This despite the fact that, based on Foer’s account (which you treat as reliable, at least with respect to those things you choose to), they could have just as easily chosen to stand behind Beauchamp’s account, correcting for the mess hall location.
K-Lo of NRO issued an opaque, meaningless disclaimer, left the fabulist on staff, and basically said: we’re done, that’s all folks.
Guess your ‘the issue’ isn’t ‘the’ issue for you after all.
Actually, Smith isn’t on the staff of the magazine. Cite.
His relationship is essentially the same as the one Beauchamp had with TNR, except that, so far as I know, he isn’t related to or intimately involved with a magazine staffer.
Sure. But what did I say, really? That Beauchamp’s story ought to be corroborated, and if it couldn’t be, it should be retracted? I don’t think that’s a terribly controversial statement on the face of it, frankly.
I waited months for this matter to be cleared up with Beauchamp. With respect to Smith, I feel I can give the National Review staff the time to conduct the review of Smith’s work that they are conducting now, per their website. That seems especially fair considering that the editors there have known of a problem for just a short time, from the looks of it.
Now, you seemed willing to give The New Republic that time to conduct their long investigation. Are you similarly willing to give National Review a while? I’m willing to bet it won’t take more than four months to take care of.
In your very first post in this thread, you accused him of lying.
Why should I believe anything you say anymore?
And TNR waited months to talk to him, and with Army officials familiar with the investigation. Instead, they stonewalled TNR, and gave interviews to wingnut bloggers and former porn stars instead.
Linky, please? K-Lo said they were done: “We did due diligence. We’ve reported this back to him. And now we’re reporting back to you.”
There’s no way I’m accepting unsubstantiated factual claims from you.
What time is necessary? Moving Car Smith has already admitted to only getting glimpses from moving cars of the things he supposedly had seen firsthand and in detail. (And one of those stories was a pretty damned big deal, or would have been if true. This wasn’t some minor bit of local color.) What’s the unresolved issue, exactly?
To say the least, this is an exaggeration of what I actually said:
What to do about his other articles. Not such a small matter, is it?
To clarify, this is what I said in my first post:
When I mentioned exaggerations, it was with the articles in mind. The lying charge came about in relation to the reversal under pressure. When someone reverses themselves like that, one assumes lying either before or afterward. You yourself assumed it - you thought Beauchamp was saying what investigators wanted to cover his ass.
Frankly, I’m hardly the only person who saw the Beauchamp stories as what we called in the Navy “sea stories”, so speculating about that hardly places me in particularly bad company, or particularly right-wing company, either.
Please quote the place where I say I believed that Beauchamp recanted what he’d written in TNR due to pressure from investigators.
As always, I don’t trust you to get the facts right, even from earlier in the same thread.
I may be wrong, but I don’t believe I ever made such an assumption.
Your sentiment, huh?