On MSNBC’s Don Imus show this morning, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman and Jonathan Alter patted themselves and their magazine on the back for their fine demonstration of media accountability…and continued the blame-the-Pentagon meme.

Take special note of Fineman’s cinematic reference.

Howard Fineman: “‘We regret that we got any part of our story wrong’ is what Mark Whitaker says in the magazine and we extend our sympathy to the victims of the violence, and just as important by the way, to the American soldiers who are in the middle of harms way over there. But what happened is, that Mike Isikoff, the last thing Mike is, is lazy. A very diligent, very experienced reporter. Who by the way is not a kid trying to break in and score here. He’s not on a holy mission of any kind. He’s just trying to report what’s going on, got in contact with a senior government official with whom he had dealt before and who was reliable in the past and who was in a position to know what investigations were going on about acts at Guantanamo.

This guy said that, this allegation which had been floating around the world for a year or two about the desecration of the Koran was something that American investigators had apparently confirmed and was expected to be in a report about Guantanamo. Now, he ran that allegation past, or sought comments about it from SOUTHCOM, which is the southern command, which oversees Gauntanamo and got a no comment from them.

And then he and John Barry, who’s our Pentagon correspondent, sent the entire Periscope item, which had a lot of other stuff in it, but was only 10 sentences long, to another official at the Pentagon. That official read the item, which was short, commented on another part of the item, which we changed as a result of his comments. But that guy had nothing to say about the rest of the item.”

Imus: “He didn’t confirm it or didn’t deny it or anything, right?”

Howard Fineman: “Well, he didn’t deny it. Now, I heard your discussion…”

Imus: “He didn’t confirm it either.”

Howard Fineman: “Well you know, there all kinds of ways this works. And I know that from the days of Watergate and “All the President’s Men”, the notion of two sources on a story has become the popular dogma about how you confirm something. And there is a lot of truth to that, but there are all kinds of ways to check to the extent that you can, a story that you get. And even in “All the President’s Men” you may remember the scene where they have a guy on the phone and they say ‘Alright, we’ll count down to 10, you know from 10 to zero and if you don’t hear otherwise then, whatever.’”

Imus: “That was a movie.”

Howard Fineman: “Yes I know. But I’m just trying to meet what the popular understanding of this is. If you run it pass SOUTHCOM and they say no comment, and you run the entire item past a senior person at the Pentagon, and he critiques some other part of the short item, but doesn’t critique that, a reasonable reporter like Mike and John Barry, and reasonable editors like the ones at Newsweek, would think that they had it pretty solid. That’s what we thought at the time. Now it turns out that our main source now isn’t sure whether what he read about investigations at Guantanamo is going to be in that report and it’s for that, that we’re apologizing. What we want to do here, unlike a lot of other news organizations, we turned our reporting sources on ourselves. And I think the story that we have in the magazine this week is extraordinary. As soon as the Pentagon came after us, and came after us hard, we went back and ran over the whole thing again with everybody who was involved. And we layout in the magazine itself, everything about our own editorial processes. And I think that, that’s commendable.”

More self-congratulations:

Jonathan Alter: “Now you say, ‘Why are you doing this kind of reporting?’ And I guess my answer to that is, that there’s really only about eight or ten news organizations in the entire world who do any real digging and everybody else kind of re-chooses what these eight or ten news organizations dig up. I understand why people are very upset about this, we’re upset about it as well, but I think the larger question that people have to ask is, do they want news organizations out there trying to dig or do they want to take all their information from the government? And, we are still you know, pretty determined, very determined, to be out there digging.”

Newsweek lied*. People died.

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