May 16, 2005
Koran desecration hoopla
White House bashes Newsweek report on Koran - Yahoo! News
Wonder why all the photos accompanying this story are from a demonstration in Mumbai. I read that demonstrations in Pakistan and Afghanistan were much bigger and turned into riots and dead people. Is it because it was just easy to take those photos in Mumbai rather than Karachi or Kabul?
Before believing this report about desecration and making all this fuss, did anyone stop to think if it was possible to flush such a big fat book down the toilet?
Posted by Parag at May 16, 2005 01:52 PM | TrackBack
yeah its wrong representation for sure.. i know people were stupid enough to kill eachother over this incident but it is just unbelievable that how easily newsweek has been able to get away with it.. i mean how can you print something without having the proper proof to prove it.. i dont think it is just newsweek but generally media needs to be more careful about such flashpoint news.. on one of the ipodder streams i was listening to a stream from public radio exchange which was about a conference held by the neiman foundation at harvard university.. i forgot the name of the journalist but he is a famous writer for the newyorker magazine.. he was saying that as a investigative journalist i cannot disclose my sources but i will not write something in a story which i cannot prove by making sure that i dont put my sources in danger.. i mean this is like the fake news briefs given on the news station you dont know whether to belive them or not to.. i think they shoud start putting a disclaimer.. saying dont believe in the story becoz we dont have a basis to prove it..
Posted by: sujit at May 16, 2005 02:07 PMHeh heh guess what, the stars for those two mulla's in the pic are definitely shining!! For no reason at all and they are now world famous ;-) Next you know, they might be found in guantanamo bay :)
Posted by: deven at May 16, 2005 07:03 PMnow it turns out that Newsweek was wrong and no such incident occurred.
Posted by: Patrix at May 16, 2005 08:03 PMI heard another story on NPR this morning.. u know what the most compelling fact was; the story was shown to white house/government officials for approval before being published.. and this morning the white house spokesman is saying that newsweek after retracting the story should be going to the muslim world and apologizing.. i cant find the story on the npr site yet as they generally post them by 8:30am and the audio anyways is available only after 10:30am.. but one thing that i still dont understand is that by writing/printing this 10 line story what exactly did the newsweek writers thought they will achieve..
Posted by: sujit at May 17, 2005 08:32 AMit seems that the story was shown not to the white house, but to someone at the pentagon
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4654641
and another key point was that the story was about 11 days old before the govt started moving on it. only when the riots started attracting attention. there was another feature later in morning edition about the use of anonymous sources in gathering and reporting news:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4654644
