After four-and-a-half months of re-reporting, long bouts of silence, and tangling with the US Army and various publications and bloggers, The New Republic today published a lengthy article by editor Franklin Foer that attempts to offer the magazine’s final word on the veracity of columns written by Scott Thomas Beauchamp, its Baghdad Diarist.
We’ll skip to the punchline, which is contained at the very end of a very long article:
In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity–which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.
When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.
We’ve read many retractions and editor’s notes over the last few years, and this is among the longest and most detailed. On its face, that’s a plus. Serious incidents are too often explained away with just a few sentences, and many details are left out. TNR has offered up a retelling of how concerns were raised about Beauchamp’s writing, and how the magazine responded to those concerns. But that doesn’t make it a completely satisfying account and explanation.
It takes Foer several thousand words to arrive at the above paragraphs; he’s buried the lede.
The lede also itself lacks a suitably blunt admission of retraction, an expression of regret, and an explanation of how the magazine will alter its policies and procedures to prevent this from happening again. Also, nowhere in the lengthy piece does Foer apologize to readers; in fact, he makes a point of opening with what seems like a dig at the Weekly Standard reporter who first raised concerns: “I didn’t know him or his byline.”
Foer takes other media to task for jumping to conclusions and explains how the military made it difficult for TNR to complete its re-reporting. Okay, interesting background. The outside pressures certainly made it difficult, but they’re not the focus at this point. The articles have been retracted — that’s the bottom line. TNR has to take its lumps and not appear as if it’s trying to spread blame.
As Maggie Shnayerson of Gawker noted earlier today:
Foer ought to have taken a page from the Chuck Lane School of Apologia. In 1998, when addressing TNR readers in the wake of the Stephen Glass scandal, the magazine’s 500-word piece concluded simply: “We offer no excuses for any of this. Only our deepest apologies to all concerned.”
Foer’s piece isn’t exactly a glossing over of the issue, but it hits several wrong notes and almost feels as if the final truth of retraction has been buried underneath an avalanche of expository writing. A simple, frank admission and expression of regret at the top of the piece would have made the important facts clear. Then the interesting background would be just that: background
