That's right!
... Oh wait. No it's not. It's not right. They didn't do it. Even in the face of this. New documents were leaked to the press (and up on Drudge yesterday) that clarify that the editors conducted an embarrassingly big (and bungled) cover-up over a number of fraudulent "reports" TNR featured from a soldier in Iraq describing our own military as a group of sadistic thugs. When conservatives smelled a rat, they found one, and the author eventually admitted he made up the articles. TNR never made a retraction. For more background on the matter, read my article in Human Events. The documents include a transcript of a phone call among editors at TNR, as well as Army investigation files. Bob Owens goes into detail with the damning information -- here are the juiciest tidbits, but it's worth reading in full:
That there was a conference call between editors of The New Republic and their debunked author Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a disclosure that I made on my personal blog on October 9, roughly a month after the call was made. Now that we see Beauchamp’s side of the conversation amounts to a weasely "I will neither confirm nor deny what I wrote," it seems obvious that The New Republic should have printed a retraction almost immediately after the call.
...Instead, they chose to remain silent, even though they knew at the time that a formal U.S. Army investigation had determined the charges made by the author were false and that the author himself would not support his own stories, even under direct questioning by TNR editors.
...After getting off the phone with Centcom’s FOIA office just moments ago, I now know that there are a total of 58 pages of sworn statements that have been collected from Beauchamp’s fellow soldiers and are now on their way to legal review.
As I pointed out before, the worst part about this whole scandal? The pieces weren't even worth running in the first place. They were vain, self-aggrandizing, and shed no light on the war. And as one friend told me, TNR has always been hated by the rabid anti-war left, and yet it felt compelled to run these articles to gain the favor of that very group. For what?
Beyond that, editors aren't just there to protect their magazines. They're also there to prevent writers from embarrassing themselves. They're called editors because they are responsible for ushering through copy as WELL as checking it to make sure it is as good as possible -- from grammar, to style, to facts. Sure, Beauchamp, the offending author, did make the choice. But he wasn't an employee hired for quality assurance.
Will someone get fired? Doubtful.
