Sometimes a story about “Topic A” rapidly metamorphoses into a story about “Topic B.” And such is the case in the still-growing flap over the Newsweek “Periscope” item that claimed that U.S. Army interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had abused copies of the Koran in interrogating prisoners housed at the facility.

Amid all the questions of fact about the reporting itself, a clear pattern becomes evident: the Bush White House trying to decapitate another news organization.

On first blush, the parallels with the CBS National Guard memo story seem obvious. But only on the surface. The notorious Rather segment ended up containing not only clear factual errors but also egregious lapses in journalistic judgment. On top of that, CBS dug in its heels for days on the story even after manifest errors in the reporting had become obvious.

CBS brought the Rathergate avalanche down upon itself. But the White House quickly saw the opportunity and seized it, effectively taming an entire news organization. And here, the White House is trying to replicate the pattern. Only the facts appear quite different.

In this case, two reporters authored a story that seems not to have been as solidly sourced as the reporters and their editors apparently thought. After several days of delay, the Pentagon issued an emphatic denial. The reporters then went back to the key source and found him second-guessing his original assertion. Newsweek first conceded errors in the story and then — apparently in response to continued White House prodding — retracted it entirely.

To recap: Newsweek thought the central claim had been confirmed. The Pentagon said these claims have been investigated and not found credible. And Newsweek now says it can’t stand behind the story.

But here’s a newsflash: reporters make mistakes. It happens every day in newspapers around the country. When a country has an aggressive, free press, it is inevitable that reporters will sometimes get stories wrong — in part because the most consequential stories often rest in part on judgment calls and not simply on clear-cut and unambiguous rules. Indeed, I could rattle off dozens in the past year alone — many advancing stories friendly to the administration — in which the poor practices on the part of the journalists were far more blameworthy than appears to be the case here.

When news organizations make errors, they have to correct the story as quickly as possible. Every honest journalist lives in fear of getting a story wrong. And when a mistake gets made, even in good faith, it puts a dent in the journalist’s reputation, which is difficult and sometimes impossible ever to remove.

If it turns out that the reporter was dishonest or reckless or simply didn’t perform as a professional journalist should, then various consequences can follow — ranging from demotion to firing or even being drummed out of the profession entirely.

Perhaps something like that will prove to be the case here; so far, though, there’s no evidence of it.
What is evident is a pattern of a White House focusing in on particular instances of vulnerable reporting and exploiting them to impose what amount to new rules for the country’s national political press. They are trying — using threats and outrageous allegations — to raise the stakes so high for ever getting anything wrong in an article that reflects poorly on the administration that far fewer will ever be written.

Here we have Scott McClellan, the president’s press secretary, specifically demanding further disavowals of the story from Newsweek, even after errors were corrected. Indeed, as of yesterday morning, the White House continues to demand that Newsweek write one or more articles praising the U.S. military’s treatment of terror-related detainees, as the price it must pay for getting out from under the debacle.

Those demands should trouble anyone. The White House is not a party at interest in this case. Perhaps the people who have been falsely accused are. Perhaps the Pentagon could demand an apology if the story turns out to be false. Or the Army. But not the White House. It is only involved here inasmuch as the story is bad for it politically.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I’m not justifying the work behind this story. I have no particular brief for Mike Isikoff or Newsweek. Indeed, it’s not clear to me precisely what happened at all. What I am saying is that occasional errors are inevitable with a truly free press. As Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker told The Washington Post this week, “You can be professional in your reporting and still make mistakes. Everyone here did the right thing.”

The price paid by the news organization and the individual journalist should be based on whether and how well they followed established journalistic practices — not on how much the White House goes after them. If the new standard is that every material fact reported must be attested to on the record then in the future we’ll know only a tiny fraction of what we do now about the internal workings of our government.

This is an effort by the White House to set an entirely different standard when it comes to reportage that in any way reflects poorly on the White House.

That’s dangerous, and everyone should recognize that.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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