A couple of additional thoughts on the Newsweek Koran story fiasco.
You clearly see two kinds of criticism of the news magazine and reporter Michael Isikoff. One school of thought focuses more on the journalistic failures and what it says about the quality of reporting and corporate fail-safe systems supposedly in place. Yet another is emerging on talk radio and on many weblogs — an intense politicization of this topic, broadening this case of journalistic failure to allegations that the magazine can’t be trusted at all on anything anymore and that this shows how the whole mainstream news media is out to get the Republicans and George Bush.
Memories are apparently short, indeed.
TMV remembers full well during the Clinton years a number of people who despised Bill Clinton saying they would never read Time Magazine ever again. They felt Time was too pro-Clinton. They felt Newsweek was not only objective but deserved a lot of credit for their reporting and guts in investigating the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewisky affair that lead to Clinton’s impeachment. The lead reporter on these stories that unearthed lots of details was Isikoff. Newsweek was praised repeatedly in those days in some quarters for it being the most objective of the news magazines.
Of course, those that see all issues as Helping Us Democrats or Hurting Us Republicans may not agree. But the reality is a reporter such as Isikoff doesn’t sit down there with talking points from the GOP OR from the Democrats. He does his job the best he can — and in this case he didn’t do it well enough — and his job has been investigative journalism. The irony is that he was hated by some on the left and is now defended by some of them; he was cheered on by some on the right and is now reviled by them.
SO TMV raises BOTH eyebrows when he reads how biased Newsweek now is right-down-the-line and how it hates Republicans when not too long ago GOPers were praising it…and Isikoff.
Does this obscure Newsweek’s journalistic failure on the Koran story? No. Just read our previous posts (we are already getting some emails from readers on the left who accuse TMV of being a Republican).
But this controversy surrounding Newsweek and the Koran story also doesn’t obscure the fact that when Newsweek was going after Clinton it was a great magazine to some folks who now say it could never be trusted. Objectivity truly is relative.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.