The New Republic's Fog of Arrogance

The New Republic has finally admitted that it can no longer stand by the accuracy of stories it published over five months ago in which an American soldier, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, made wild derogatory claims about soldiers serving with him in Iraq.

It takes The New Republic 14 pages of online text (roughly 10,000 words) to finally get to the painful bottom line admission:

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity--which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

It's nice that The New Republic has finally admitted the obvious, but it should not get off the hook this easily.  It is not "the standards of this magazine" that brought Beauchamp's story down.  It is the diligence and determination of bloggers, especially Confederate Yankee.  (Among others who pressed the story were Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard, Ace of Spades, and Michelle Malkin.)

What's left in tatters is The New Republic's credibility.  The magazine left its readers hanging for over five months on this story, even though major factual innacuracies were known long ago.  During that time, TNR's reaction to the controversy was alternately to sneer at, or to ignore, its critics.

The New Republic blames this fiasco on "The Fog of War."

No, it's more like "The Fog of Vision-Clouding Bias," the "Fog of Inability to Take Responsibility" and, most of all, "The Fog of Arrogance."

Sadly, the fog still lingers at The New Republic.