Sucker-Punched

At Pajamas Media this morning, Richard Miniter has posted a devastating article called How The New Republic Got Suckered. It is the most incisive look into the heart of The New Republic during the early days of the Scott Thomas Beauchamp scandal thus far.

Miniter draws heavily from former TNR assistant to the editor Robert McGee, who recounts his experiences inside The New Republic before being terminated and then slapped with a cease and desist order by the magazine's lawyers for revealing that Beauchamp was married to a TNR fact-checker and writer, Elspeth Reeve.

It is because of this relationship that I suspect Franklin Foer and other TNR editors failed to adequately fact-check Beauchamp's three articles. What still remains unanswered is if Reeve was the fact-checker on her husband's stories, as such a conflict of interest would be yet another violation of journalistic ethics.

Also telling, if accurate, is McGee's observation that Foer may have approached, and may still be approaching, the scandal with ideological blinders firmly in place.

Later that night, Robert McGee, a then-assistant to The New Republic's publisher, went looking for the host. He is curious what Foer thinks about the building scandal. He wants the inside dope.

He finds Foer on the front porch and asks as casually as he can: "So, what's up with this?"

As McGee recalls the conversation, Foer immediately volunteered the standard answer: conservatives have an ideological grudge to settle because they perceive the magazine to be anti-war, anti-military and so on.

"He sounded almost rehearsed," McGee said.

What bothered McGee about the conversation was that Foer saw the questions from the bloggers as a completely ideological attack. "Foer wasn't acknowledging that at least some of the attacks on the [Beauchamp's] 'Shock Troops' piece came from active-duty military members whose skepticism was factually grounded, and not just from stateside political pundits."

Discounting criticism merely as a result of the ideological position of the critics was a serious mistake by Foer, though hardly the first, and certainly not the last.

Just because political pundits made these observations does not make them invalid. It matters little who tells you that Glocks do not fire "square-backed" bullets; this fact does not change if it comes from a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat.

Nor does it matter that it was this conservative blogger blew away TNR's insistence that they fact-checked Beauchamp's claims before publication by pointing out that if TNR has run so much as a Google search before publishing Beauchamp's libelous murder claim in “Dark of Night," then he would have likely been exposed as a fabulist well in advanced of "Shock Troops."

Time and again, it seems, Franklin Foer and perhaps other senior TNR editors allowed personal loyalties to subvert their editorial responsibilities.

In the beginning, these were small sins.

One wants to be able to trust the spouse of a staffer. I can understand why the fact-checking that should have occurred may have been minimized in Beauchamp's first post.

But in "Dead of Night," Beauchamp makes significant fact errors in leveling an accusation of murder. Personal relationships should matter little when an author makes such an inflammatory charge, and the editor's have a significant duty to verify that the facts support such a potentially divisive claim.

It is painfully obvious that even a passing attempt to verify the claims was never made. No handgun on the planet fires a "square-backed" pistol bullet, and if the editors had so much as bothered to click on the Glock web site, they would have readily discovered that Glocks use the same ammunition as every other 9x19mm caliber pistol, and that this claim was absurd.

Further, the editors of The New Republic made absolutely no attempt to verify the demonstrably false Beauchamp claim that "the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police."

This fabrication is easily discredited within seconds with a simple Google search.

Glocks are a common and favored handgun on the Iraqi black market:

Glock pistols were also easy to find. One young Iraqi man, Rebwar Mustafa, showed a Glock 19 he had bought at the bazaar in Kirkuk last year for $900. Five of his friends have bought identical models, he said.

There are literally dozens of stories of Glock pistols being recovered from insurgents, terrorists, and militiamen. They have been captured in cordon-and-search operations, in targeted raids, recovered in weapons caches, and taken from dead and wounded insurgents, militiamen, and criminals.

American soldiers also have them, as do civilian contractors. Ordinary Iraqi civilians (men and women) buy them to protect their families. Glock are quite likely the most ubiquitous handgun in Iraq, carried officially or unofficially by those on all sides, and those on no side at all.

But Franklin Foer's editors did not fact check any part of the murder claim made in "Dead of Night." That is clear, and in doing so, the editors' of The New Republic slipped from being loyal friends making an innocent mistake, into what can only be described as an overt case of editorial malpractice.

Had the editors of The New Republic actually edited this article and fact-checked it before publication, there is every reason to believe that these significant fact errors in "Dark of Night" would have eventually led to the quiet termination of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's writing career at The New Republic after one article.

But Franklin Foer and the other editors at The New Republic utterly failed in their editorial responsibilities.

Instead, the willful disregard of editorial standards allowed Beauchamp not only to libelously assign a murder based upon false claims, it also allowed him to later publish his most infamous post, "Shock Troops," in which he wrote three vignettes that effectively slandered every soldier in his entire company and within the other companies with which his unit served.

But this editorial dereliction of duty was by no means the greatest sin of the editors of The New Republic.

Once caught, they escalated their editorial incompetence with a series of readily apparent purposeful deceptions, dissembling to readers and critics alike.

Franklin Foer stated that The New Republic fact-checked "Shock Troops" before publication. That statement is an obvious falsehood. Foer's magazine utterly failed to fact-check the article prior to publication, and therefore had to move the time, location and underlying premise of Beauchamp's primary charge to another time and country when they did finally attempt to fact-check it well after publication.

Foer's editors attempted to further deceive readers and critics on at least two other known occasions.

The New Republic claimed to publish the findings of an internal investigation that they said vindicated the magazine, but was in actuality nothing more than an apparent attempt to save their jobs via a whitewash.

The magazine offered no named witnesses or experts, no evidence or testimony, and when one of the experts TNR claimed to have supported their story was located, it became abundantly obvious that TNR avoided a real investigation, did not provide him with any context, and was attempted to only provide itself with rhetorical cover. The attempt failed, miserably.

The magazine has also apparently made it a practice to bury dissenting viewpoints, such as when a military PAO based in Kuwait told TNR editor Jason Zengerle that the story was regarded as an urban legend or myth. Zengerle acknowledges he was told this, but the account was never published in The New Republic.

Foer's magazine then attempted to avoid responsibility for their editorial malpractice, purposeful deception, and account burying by blaming the Army, claiming that the Army was obstructing their investigation.

But the Army never obstructed any investigation by The New Republic. This is presumably fine, as The New Republic had no intention of really conducting one.

But now we are left with a magazine where the editors have moved beyond merely partisanship and incompetence to obvious willful deception of their readers and critics alike, and perhaps actionable fraud.

It remains to be seen how CanWest Mediaworks, owner of The New Republic and other media properties, will respond.
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