There are many, many, many other blogs out there that have done a great job covering the whole Newsweek Quran fiasco so I do not have a whole lot to add. My question is this: When a news outlet/print media reports things that undermine the war effort (and do so on purpose), at what point does it cross the line and become an act of treason? I do not necessarily want my news to be a rubber stamp cheerleader for our government, that can lead to all sorts of problems. But I do expect that the people writing the stories would have the decency to ask if the story they are about to run with will help or hurt the war effort. Bad things happen in war. Atrocities happen. But reporting on some supposed “abuse” that involves the most sacred text in the area of the world in which we are fighting strikes me as damn near close to treason. How could you not known the results of such a story? Anyway. I am glad they “apologized”, but it still begs the question about deliberately undermining the war effort.

The best lines I have read on this come from Kevin over at Wizbang:

“People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?”

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita, on the anonymous source behind Newsweek’s Periscope item. Said “son of a bitch” has since recanted his story, leaving Newsweek with some serious ass-exposure, considering 15 people died (and scores were injured) in riots throughout the Middle East in the wake of the story.

Bully to Newsweek for taking a third hand report from an anonymous source because it confirmed their pre-existing suspicions, and running it without proper fact checking.[empahsis mine] Bonus points for employing the CBS strategy of running a report (right before release) in front of a government official and treating their lack of outraged denial as proof that the story was true.

Nice. Sums it up perfectly.

Here are some other fine places to read further about this topic.

Michelle Malkin
Powerline
Little Green Footballs

Jonah Goldberg over at NRO’s The Corner has several great posts about this go here, here and here.