David Brooks has a decent piece up on the over-reaction of EVERYONE regarding Newsweek:
Maybe it won’t be so bad being cut off from the blogosphere. I look around the Web these days and find that Newsweek’s retracted atrocity story has sent everybody into cloud-cuckoo-land. Every faction up and down the political spectrum has used the magazine’s blunder as a chance to open fire on its favorite targets, turning this into a fevered hunting season for the straw men.
Many of my friends on the right have decided that the Newsweek episode exposes the rotten core of the liberal media. Dennis Prager, who is intelligent 99 percent of the time, writes, “Newsweek is directly responsible for the deaths of innocents and for damaging America.” Countless conservatives say the folks at Newsweek were quick to believe the atrocity tales because they share the left-wing, post-Vietnam mentality. On his influential blog, Austin Bay writes that the coastal media “presume the worst about the U.S. military – always make that presumption.”
Excuse me, guys, but this is craziness. I used to write for Newsweek. I know Mike Isikoff and the editors. And I know about liberals in the media. The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.
It reeally is too good for me to excerpt, something I am not used to saying about David Brooks. At any rate, he is right. The people to blame for the riots are the rioters and the cynical mullahs who whipped them into a frenzy- not Newsweek. Threats to control the press, or limit their freedoms, or to prosecute them, are misguided and dangerous.
The insanity of the overreach by both left and right is something that became really clear to me just by reading the comments to to the posts I made earlier this week in which I refused to condemn Newsweek to the fiery pits of hell. Sometimes I wonder if this snarky piece from Matt Yglesias is what many really want…
And, as an example of hysteria, I offer you Ann Coulter.
*** Update ***
The Instapundit adds:
BLAME THE CRAZY MUSLIMS: This seems to be the rapidly-gelling defense of Newsweek.
I respectfully disagree. This is not about absolving Newsweek of any sins. What they did in this case was horribly irresponsible, and you can’t excuse a news outfit putting out an inflammatory story with thinly sourced bullshit. Newsweek should be scorned for their laziness, and they, in my opinion should out the damned liar who fed them the nonsense.
However, this is a defense in some sense, in that those who want to put a stake through the heart of all media are using this Newsweek story as a club with which to beat all media around the head and neck, and that is misguided. Newsweek put out a shoddy story, but they are not responsible for the actions of a bunch of lunatics overseas. Should they be more careful so as to not provide them ammunition they don’t need? Sure. But they didn’t supply the gun, let alone brandish it, aim it, and pull the trigger.