Tuesday, August 07, 2007

The New Republic's Baghdad Diarist Recants

I haven't been covering the saga of Scott Thomas [Beauchamp]because of lack of time and the fact that there was already extensive coverage, especially at Ace of Spades HQ.

To catch everyone up however Scott Thomas Beauchamp is an American soldier stationed at FOB Falcon out site Baghdad who is married to a staffer at The New Republic, because of this he was hired by TNR to provide reports from Iraq as the Baghdad Diarist. Apparently he has written three pieces so far, all very anti-war / anti-administration. The first two didn't garner much attention, but then he wrote a piece called "Shock Troops" and all bets were off.

This piece purported to show the dehumanizing effects of war by relating a series of events including mocking a disfigured woman (injured by an IED?), desecrating the dead by wearing a portion of a kids skull at a skull cap, and using a Bradley Fighting Vehicle to randomly kill dogs.

Almost immediately after it's publication Beauchamp's veracity was challenged. The main of the outrage being directed towards the mocking of the disfigured woman. People began attempting to verify the story with no success. Beauchamp was shocked that his story was being questioned and revealed his full name in order to stand behind his work and the honor and integrity of his fellow soldiers (you know the dog killing, grave desecrating, wounded mocking heroes he describes in the article).

In an effort to stand behind their author The New Republic vouched for his accuracy stating the story had been fact checked. Further investigation revealed this fact checking to have been cursory at best, with the editor stating that they had sent the story to another reporter in Iraq to see if it passed the "smell test". The outrage continued and The New Republic stated they were re-validating all points of the story. Soon after they reported that they had validated all the incidents, but that the mocking of the disfigured woman had actually occurred in Kuwait before Beauchamp ever deployed in combat, not at FOB Falcon.

This was very significant because it changed the entire tenor of the story from someone damaged by the horrors of war coming to the realization of how much he had changed to that of an insensitive jackass making fun of the disabled. The question "am I a monster" no longer elicits sympathy but just underlines what a jackass the author is.

There was also another problem, in his article Beauchamp essentially admitted to a number of violations of the UCMJ. When his command investigated he admitted that the entire article was false. So how did The New Republic validate it?

The answer might be found in this video of two reporters discussing fact checking. Listen to it carefully to see what constitutes an adequate level of fact checking at The New Republic.

I have to say I almost started laughing hard enough to crap myself when the reporter from Atlantic Monthly tries to excuse this episode by saying that bloggers on the one hand expect the "MSM" to be inaccurate and full of mistakes but then when they do get something wrong bloggers want heads to roll because the "MSM" is a huge institution with an army of fact checkers and they shouldn't have made the mistake. That might be because the "MSM" itself actually makes that claim and the are only being held to their own words.

One more point I want to make about this episode - Some people will be concerned about the Army investigating this incident, I would be too if this had been presented as fiction or fictionalization of events, but he presented the story as his personal experiences, and as I stated above he basically admitted to a number of violations of military law and that made it appropriate.

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