This “bad reporting” idea regarding Newsweek is the same “bad reporting” idea floated about Bush’s Killian TANG memos by Dan Rather. Both are examples of inadequate fact checking, both are examples of the Right saying, “see, it’s all bullshit!” without really examining the substance of the allegations. There has been desecration of the Quran at Guantánamo (reported as far back as March 2003 by ABC [Australia] Radio, ABC [America] News, the New York Times, the Guardian [UK], the Daily Mirror, the Houston Chronicle, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Seattle Times) and there are serious questions about Bush’s failure to fulfill his National Guard commitments. (Read more at Raw Story)

Furthermore, the Bush maladministration itself (General Richard B. Meyers of the Joint Chiefs) said:

GEN. MYERS: It’s the — it’s a judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eikenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran — and I’ll get to that in just a minute — but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his Cabinet is conducting in Afghanistan. So that’s — that was his judgment today in an after- action of that violence. He didn’t — he thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.

…before Rove’s brain saw another chance to force the already-castrated mainstream media into another poor public relations spectacle. next thing you know, Scott McClellan is out there shining the Dan Rather Spotlight o’ Shame on Newsweek.

Instead of blaming the messenger, let’s take a page from Republican rhetoric and call for some “personal responsibility”. If the people guarding our Islamic prisoners are putting the Quran into toilets, you blame the idiots who gave them that order or allowed that to happen, not the newsmagazine that reports it. Sheesh, it’s like Abu Ghraib, where the DoD was upset not that there was torture, but that someone reported it.

And I don’t even have to go to the WMD issue, though in light of the London Times memo, it’s hard to see how you can still believe Bush “got it wrong” rather than “purposefully misconstrued and manufactured intelligence to sell a war already pre-determined to happen.”

Personally, I’m sick of this “cautious journalism” (read: speak no ill of the Bush maladminstration or their corporate masters). A little more “reckless sensationalism” in 2002 and 2003, the kind that can uncover a consensual blowjob in a private office, might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and kept us out of war.