Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Conflicts Of Uninterest
Susan Hu of Booman Tribune has another excellent diary at Daily Kos concerning the Newsweek "retraction" which she has been constantly updating all night.
The diary contains some lines from a Times UK article link I e-mailed to Susan which further prove precedence for U.S. Military abuses of the Koran:
"Despite Newsweek's about-turn, the Pentagon has yet to state officially that no mistreatment of the Koran by interrogators took place at Guantanamo Bay, where the US has held 600 detainees in legal limbo for more than three years."
"General Richard Myers Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that no evidence has yet been found to support the claims. Such allegations had been raised before Newsweek's report. A lawyer for some Guantanamo inmates has blamed the attempted suicide of 23 of them in August 2003 on a US guard stamping on the Koran."
The Raw Story also has a must-reader: Newsweek report on Quran matches many earlier accounts:
"Contrary to White House assertions, the allegations of religious desecration at Guantanamo published by Newsweek May 6 are common among ex-prisoners and have been widely reported outside the United States..."
"Several former detainees at the Guantanamo and Bagram airbase prisons have reported instances of their handlers sitting or standing on the Quran, throwing or kicking it in toilets, and urinating on it."
"Where the Newsweek report likely erred was in saying that the U.S. was slated to acknowledge desecrating the Quran in internal investigations, and in relying on a single anonymous source to make grave allegations. But reports of desecration are manifold."
The Raw Story also linked to an article in Tuesday's edition of The New York Times entitled "Newsweek Says It Is Retracting Koran Report" written by Katharine Q. Seelye and Neil A. Lewis.
The Times mentions some of the prior cases that Susan Hu wrote about yesterday but I want to focus on something else in the article:
"Still, damage-control experts said that Newsweek's handling of the story had created a public relations disaster. "They tap-danced," said Robert K. Passikoff, president of Brand Keys Inc., a consumer loyalty firm based in New York. "They should have immediately bit the bullet and admitted they were wrong. There was no middle ground here.'""
"Dr. Passikoff said that the retraction "seems like too little, too late" because of the nature of the error. "It had such far-reaching effects," he said. "People died because of this story.""
You might know Dr. Passikoff from the Martha Stewart case since he granted about 250 interviews and appeared on more cable news shows than Jeff Gannon.
According to the Charlotte Observer article (linked in the preceding paragraph), which I found as a press release at the Brand Keys Website, "Passikoff, the brand company president, relies on his research and surveys when he comments on the news. "While I'm a smart guy, my individual opinion doesn't mean anything," Passikoff said."
Do you want to know what else I found out on the Brand Keys Website?
In the Who We Are section I learned that Dr. Passikoff's "company has developed research and brand planning programs for such diverse clients as Citibank, Burger King, First USA, Toyota, Canon, American Express, AVIS, The NFL, The NBA, American General, Sears, US News & World Report, Apple, Symantec, KeySpan Energy, GlaxoSmithKline, Flint Ink, and the Chrysler Corporation."
How come Katharine Q. Seelye and Neil A. Lewis didn't mention that one of the doctor's clients was a competitor of Newsweek?
Can you say conflict of interest, New York Times staff?
Speaking of conflicts of interest, guess what else I found out on the Brand Keys Website?
According to A Partial Listing of Brand Keys Clients, The New York Times is not only an interviewer but also a client of the doctor's company.
How come Katharine Q. Seelye and Neil A. Lewis didn't mention that another of the doctor's clients could be considered a competitor of Newsweek: The New York Times itself.
Oddly enough, Nat Ives failed to mention any possible conflict of interest when he quoted from the doctor on May 5th in an article he wrote for The New York Times.
Strange as it may seem, Stuart Elliott failed to mention any possible conflict of interest when he quoted from the doctor on April 5th in an article he wrote for The New York Times.
Stuart Elliot also accidently failed to mention it when he quoted from the doctor in a completely unrelated story on March 30th.
But don't listen to me.
I'm the silly blogger who believes that the rampant plagiarism of the MSM committed by a "news organization" composed of activists and operatives from the G.O.P. qualifies as a news story of some sort of value.
"Journalists" like Katharine Q. Seelye know an awful lot more than I do about the rules of her profession and what constitutes as a conflict of interest.
I'm just one of those bloggers who unfairly pick on the Press for being uninterested in telling the truth about how much they now suck.
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