<div><div style="float: right; padding-left: 17px;"> <div style="display: block;" id="toolbox_ad_right"> </div> <div style="margin-top: 4px; margin-bottom: 4px;"><div><br> </div> </div> </div><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/"><font color="#000000" face="helvetica,arial" size="-1"><b>washingtonpost.com</b></font></a><font size="+2"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br> </span>Newsweek Retracts Koran Story</b></font><br><p><font size="-1">By Howard Kurtz<br>Washington Post Staff Writer<br>Monday, May 16, 2005; 5:59 PM<br></font></p><p></p><p>Newsweek issued a formal retraction today of the flawed story that sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan and other countries after coming under increasingly sharp criticism from the White House, State Department and Pentagon.</p><p>Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said the magazine had already "retracted what we think we may have gotten wrong. We've called it an error. We've called it a mistake." But two hours after that interview, the magazine issued a statement retracting its charge that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that an American interrogator at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. At least 16 people were killed last week when protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia and other countries turned violent.</p><p>The damage control efforts by Newsweek followed criticism by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who called it "puzzling" that Newsweek, in his view, had "stopped short of a retraction."</p><p>"That story has damaged the image of the United States abroad and damaged the credibility of the media at home," McClellan said in an interview. He said that Americans, including President Bush, "share in the outrage that this report was published in the first place."</p><p>The intensifying rhetoric came a day after Whitaker apologized for the May 1 report. He said in the interview that Newsweek was "still trying to ascertain" whether there was any evidence that such a Koran incident took place, as some detainees have alleged -- as opposed to the magazine's specific allegation that the U.S. Southern Command had confirmed that an interrogator had defiled the sacred Muslim text.</p><p>Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, said the story has "done a lot of harm" to U.S. efforts to reach out to the Muslim world.</p><p>Speaking to journalists on the way back from her surprise visit to Iraq, Rice said that "it's appalling that this story got out there. . . . The sad thing was that there was a lot of anger that got stirred by a story that was not very well founded."</p><p>Rice said she hopes "that everybody will step back and take a look at how they handled this -- everybody."</p><p>Asked about the Newsweek report, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted the loss of life, saying: "People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be very careful about what they do." Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that military investigators had reviewed 25,000 pages of documents and found that more than one detainee stopped up a toilet with pages from the Koran as a protest -- but no evidence that U.S. interrogators had done such a thing.</p><p>Newsweek, which is owned by The Washington Post Co., said Sunday that its brief item was based on an unnamed senior U.S. official, who said the Koran incident would be cited in a forthcoming report by military investigators. The official now says he can "no longer be sure" of the information provided to reporter Michael Isikoff, the magazine said.</p><p>McClellan said the story "appears to be very shaky from the get-go" and rests on "a single anonymous source who cannot substantiate the allegation that was made."</p><p>Isikoff said Sunday that "there was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards," noting that the Pentagon declined an opportunity to challenge the story before it was published.</p><p>On sensitive stories, Whitaker said, journalists often have to rely on whether officials "deny them or how vehemently they deny them." But McClellan said it would be "troubling if that's the standard they used."</p><p>Bob Zelnick, a former Pentagon correspondent who now chairs Boston University's journalism department, said he often based stories on unnamed officials. "I don't see how a reporter can function in a sensitive beat without relying on anonymous sources -- even one anonymous source if the reporter has confidence in him." But Zelnick said that even if the Koran incident was true, he would have had "reservations" about running it because "the potential to inflame is greater than the value of the piece itself."</p><p>Asked if anyone at Newsweek would be disciplined or fired, Whitaker, who was out of town when the item was published, said: "So far as we can tell, everybody in the reporting process conducted themselves professionally. Isikoff was dealing with a known source. . . . We went by the book." But Whitaker said the magazine would examine who approved the story for publication and review its standards for dealing with unnamed sources.</p><div id="ad_links_bottom" align="center"><div align="center"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="452"><tbody><tr><td align="left"><br> </td></tr></tbody></table></div> </div> </div> <div style="display: none;"> </div> <noscript> <img src="http://stats.surfaid.ihost.com/crc/images/uc.GIF?1.13&wpost&wpost&noscript" height="1" width="1" alt="" border="0"></noscript> <noscript><img src="//stats.surfaid.ihost.com/crc/images/uc.GIF?1.13&wpost&wpost&noscript" height="1" width="1" alt="" border="0"></noscript>
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