The New Republic taken in again?

[Mr.Moto]

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.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

Brian Williams has a oddly shaped face.

[RTFirefly]

@Mr. Moto

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.

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:

Among [the Drudge] documents was a transcript of a phone conversation that TNR Editor Franklin Foer and TNR Executive Editor J. Peter Scoblic had with Beauchamp on September 6—the first time the Army had granted TNR permission to speak with Beauchamp since it cut off outside contact with him on July 26.

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.

[Mr.Moto]

Do you find them reliable on that point? You are skeptical of much else that they write about.

[RTFirefly]

@Mr. Moto

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.

[Mr.Moto]

I’m bumping this mess because TNR has finally retracted the Beauchamp stories.

[tomndebb]

I think retraction overstates their action by a considerable bit:

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

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.

[tomndebb]

Observations about the other TNR. (This time regarding an actual reporter, not a blogging stringer.)

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Observations about the other TNR. (This time regarding an actual reporter, not a blogging stringer.)
[/QUOTE]

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.

[RTFirefly]

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.”

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
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.”
[/QUOTE]

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.

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
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?
[/QUOTE]

From the link:

Beauchamp’s writings had originally appealed to us because we wanted to publish a soldier’s introspections. We still believe in this journalistic mission, especially as the number of reporters embedded in Iraq dwindles. But, as these months of controversy have shown, telling the story of what is happening in Iraq through a soldier’s eyes is a fraught project. The more we dug into Beauchamp’s writings, the more clear it became that we might have been in the realm of war stories, a genre notoriously rife with embellishment. It is telling that Beauchamp and his comrades gave the disfigured woman mythological names–Crypt Keeper, Mandrake’s Bride–and made her the subject of telling and retelling.

For the past four-and-a-half months, we’ve been reluctant to retract Beauchamp’s stories. Substantial evidence supports his account. It is difficult to imagine that he could enlist a conspiracy of soldiers to lie on his behalf. And they didn’t just vouch for him–they added new details and admitted gaps in their own knowledge. If they were simply lying to protect him, they likely wouldn’t have alerted us to Beauchamp’s Kuwait mistake. Furthermore, our conversation with Cross confirmed important underlying premises–the existence of bones, Bradleys running over dogs.

Finally, we had obligations to the writer, whatever anxieties we might have had about these pieces. For long stretches, the military prevented Beauchamp from defending himself against his accusers. Even when he was allowed to speak with us, he did so under obvious duress. And the Army’s behavior–its initial efforts to bury the results of its investigation, not to mention the four months and counting it has taken to process our Freedom of Information Act request for those results–made us reluctant to rush to judgment.

But, after our re-reporting, some of our questions are still unanswered. Did the driver intentionally run over dogs? Did he record his kills in a little green notebook? We’ve never been able to reach the driver. And Beauchamp told us that he’d procure a page from the notebook, but that has not materialized. This is a plausible anecdote, and several soldiers in Beauchamp’s unit had heard stories about dog-hunting, but only one had actually seen the driver Beauchamp wrote about intentionally hit dogs. He is one of Beauchamp’s friends, and, over the course of a number of e-mail exchanges with him, our faith in him has diminished.

Several weeks after the monitored call in September, we finally had the opportunity to ask Beauchamp, without any of his supervisors on the line, about how he could mistake a dining hall in Kuwait for one in Iraq. He told us he considered the detail to be “mundane” given the far more horrific events he had witnessed. That’s not a convincing explanation. If the event was so mundane, why did he write about it–and with such vivid detail? In accounting for the inaccuracy of a central fact, he sounded defensive and evasive.

Beauchamp has lived through this ordeal under the most trying of conditions. He is facing pressures that we can only begin to imagine. And, over the course of our dealings with him, we’ve tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Ever since August, we’ve asked him, first though his wife and lawyer and later via direct e-mail and phone calls, to personally obtain the sworn statements that the military had him draft and sign on July 26. And, ever since then, he has promised repeatedly to do just that. We are, unfortunately, still waiting.

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity–which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

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?

[RTFirefly]

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
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.
[/quote]
How does that affect the underlying in/accuracy of the original reporting, or your response to it?

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.

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.

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
K-Lo of NRO issued an opaque, meaningless disclaimer, left the fabulist on staff, and basically said: we’re done, that’s all folks.
[/QUOTE]

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.

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
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.
[/QUOTE]

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.

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
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.
[/QUOTE]

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.

[RTFirefly]

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
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.
[/quote]
In your very first post in this thread, you accused him of lying.

Why should I believe anything you say anymore?

I waited months for this matter to be cleared up with Beauchamp.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
In your very first post in this thread, you accused him of lying.

Why should I believe anything you say anymore?
[/QUOTE]

To say the least, this is an exaggeration of what I actually said:

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
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.”
[/QUOTE]

Here you go.

If I had it all to do over again I would have just gone live when we knew we had a handle on the posts in question and not waited another minute to apologize and let everyone know what was happening here.

While I knew something was wrong before last week, I did not know about it six weeks ago, as some have reported, and while you can question all the calls I made, there was never any intention here to make excuses or hide anything.

I wish this hadn’t happened. I still think Smith is a well-intentioned reporter. We post him on a submission-by-submission basis and will continue to do so unless we have reason to decide otherwise. (And we are currently doing a more thorough review of all his work.)

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
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?
[/QUOTE]

What to do about his other articles. Not such a small matter, is it?

[Mr.Moto]

To clarify, this is what I said in my first post:

Now, none of this has any bearing on whether any of this was true or not. But at this point, nobody can tell. I sure can’t, though the tales look exaggerated to a degree at least. Scott Beauchamp has reversed himself, and if whether we take him at his word now or then, he was lying at some point. TNR says they have confirmation of some tales, but they’re being close lipped about that. It may be that this confirmation is from people over there who “knew” of these things secondhand at best. Military units are natural rumor mills. The Army has conducted an investigation and apparently Beauchamp has been administratively punished to some degree. But we do not know the scale of his punishment, and what the Army can do even without a court martial is significant.

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.

[RTFirefly]

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.

[Mr.Moto]

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
I find it hard to be surprised that an institution with plenty of incentive to cover its own ass, and near-total control over the lives of the witnesses, would be able to ‘prove’ that Beauchamp’s allegations were false.

And after his being held incommunicado for about a month, and probably either being browbeaten or in solitary the whole time, I can understand why Beauchamp would want to just walk away from the whole deal.

At this point, I’d believe the military on the subject if and only if they gave Beauchamp and all the witnesses to his story an honorable discharge, so that they could corroborate or contradict Beauchamp’s story without fear of reprisal.

And since Beauchamp was supervised while he spoke, my sentiment is that in the transcript, we’re hearing the words his minders wanted him to say, rather than what he might have said freely.

I have zero respect for The New Republic, but in their position, I’d stand firm too.
[/QUOTE]

Your sentiment, huh?