Cathy Young puts the ongoing Beauchamp controversy under the microscope in a must read post:
The Scott Thomas Beauchamp brouhaha is a proverbial tempest in a teapot. The claims Beauchamp made (as the barely pseudonymous “Scott Thomas”) in his “Baghdad Diarist” New Republic article about American soldiers behaving badly are fairly trivial; the war in Iraq does not stand or fall on their truthfulness. Nonetheless, the blogosphere’s reaction to the story has been sharply divided along pro-war and anti-war lines almost from the start, and this across-the-board knee-jerk response is, perhaps, the most interesting (if depressing) aspect of the entire affair.
Right meme: it’s a liberal media conspiracy to besmirch the war effort by encouraging a leftist literary poseur to publish fictional or embellished stories painting soldiers as depraved sociopaths. Left meme: it’s a right-wing cyber-lynching of a soldier telling the ugly truth about the war. TNR’s announcement that it has confirmed the story to its satisfaction has not changed any minds.
Her ending:
The] fact that a magazine like TNR (whose current issue, by the way, features a magnificent, poignant selection of photos from Iraq by freelance photographer Ashley Gilbertson) owes its readers real accuracy, not just a “close enough.” Truth in journalism matters; that’s why the Beauchamp saga is not entirely trivial. And even those who are rightly disgusted by the hysteria about “slandering the troops” should not overlook this fact. In the end, Beauchamp and his persecutors may well deserve each other.
Read it all from beginning to end.
And also read this post of hers, too.
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.