Michael Isikoff, one of the two Newsweek writers who reported, based on an anonymous source, that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Quran, said "we blame ourselves" for the furor created by the now discredited report.
The article in the magazine’s May 9 issue led to rioting in the Muslim world that took the lives of more than a dozen people.
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"Whenever something like this happens, you’ve got to take stock and review what you did," Isikoff, 53, told The New York Times.
"The big point that leaps out is the cultural one. Neither Newsweek nor the Pentagon foresaw that a reference to the desecration of the Quran was going to create the kind of response that it did.
"The Pentagon saw the item before it ran, and then they didn’t move us off it for 11 days afterward. They were as caught off guard by the furor as we were. We obviously blame ourselves for not understanding the potential ramifications."
Clearly, Issikoff’s comments and explanation for the debacle appear to be far more responsible than his magazine’s, which at first apologized for the story but wouldn’t retract it.
Isikoff is no stranger to controversy. He was the reporter who discovered the liaison between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and his revelations led to impeachment proceedings against the president.
Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent for Linda Tripp – the Pentagon employee who taped Lewinsky talking about her meetings with Clinton – recalled an encounter with Isikoff:
"He just showed up one day at Linda’s office," Goldberg told The Times. "We don’t know how he got there.
"I found him infuriatingly professional. He crossed all the t’s, dotted all the i’s, doubled-sourced everything and drove us crazy."
But in the Quran debacle, Isikoff has been denounced by the Pentagon for relying on a single anonymous source.
"When you live by unnamed sources," said Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, "you can get burned badly when the source is wrong."
Said Robert Boynton, director of the magazine program at New York University: "A story like this isn’t really the result of bad reporting. It’s the result of uncritical covering of the information they were handed."
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