Jay Rosen superbly summarizes just what constitutes news to Newsweek:

Newsweek, which I will call S1 for our first level source, and for which we have names (Michael Isikoff, Mark Whitaker, John Barry) said that it had sources (S2) without names, who in turn said that other sources (S3) also without names, working as investigators for the government, have learned enough from their sources (S4), likewise unnamed, to conclude in a forthcoming report for U.S. Southern Command (finally, a name!) that unnamed interrogators (S5) dumped the Qur’an into toilets to make a point with prisoners (S6) who are Muslims but also not named.

But it gets even shakier when you inquire into what Rosen calls the S2 sources:

Source Level 2 are the unnamed sources in the government… These sources now appear unreliable, and won’t confirm. It appears that one of them was not really a source for the allegation but a Pentagon official who was shown the report and didn’t disconfirm it. From the New York Times account by Katharine Seelye:

In addition, the reporters, Michael Isikoff, a veteran investigative reporter, and John Barry, a national security correspondent, showed a draft of the article to the source and to a senior Pentagon official asking if it was correct. The source corrected one aspect of the article, which focused on the Southern Command’s internal report on prisoner abuse.

"But he was silent about the rest of the item," Newsweek reported.

OK, let’s apply the Newsweek standard. Assume that an anonymous reader emails me with a juicy news item. My reader says that his girlfriend saw Michael Isikoff expose himself at lunch today at the big fountain in front of Newsweek’s New York offices.

As a responsible journalist, I want confirmation. So I ask Newsweek’s Washington Bureau Chief Dan Klaidman to take a look at my news article and comment. Klaidman replies, "I don’t believe a word of it. For one thing, there’s no fountain in front of our New York offices."

Klaidman has corrected one aspect of the article. But he was silent about the rest of the item. I can conclude that my anonymous source’s story has been confirmed and go public with the story of Isikoff’s act of perversion.

If it turns out to be false, I can blame Newsweek for not correcting me in time.

So, let me get this straight. Newsweek prints an inflammatory charge based on a hearsay claim by an anonymous source, with no corroboration of any kind. (The details, such as they are, don’t even make sense — in what kind of toilet can you flush a book? Must not be one of the low-flow types!) The story triggers riots in the Islamic world, perhaps orchestrated by Islamofascists, that claim at least 15 lives. Eventually, Newsweek retracts the story and apologizes.

So, when the Today Show’s Matt Lauer interviews Newsweek’s Washington Bureau Chief Dan Klaidman, he’s going to ask some tough questions to get to the bottom of Newsweek’s culpability, right? Wrong. He wants to get to the bottom of the Bush administration’s culpability — there just has to be some.

So, Lauer wants to know if the White House pressured Newsweek to retract the story in order to further the administration’s (you can almost hear the sotto voce "eeevil") foreign policy agenda. He wants to know if the criticism of Newsweek from administration officials is "piling on." And, of course, he has to remind viewers that Newsweek’s charge hasn’t really been discredited, since others have made similar allegations. (Yeah, released detainees who were taught in al Qaeda training camps to make false claims of torture, abuse, and humiliation if ever captured — and their mouthpieces at media outlets like al Jazeera, al Reuters, and al AFP.)

You can see the Lauer interview by "launching" it from this story — if you have IE6 and Windows Media Player and don’t mind watching a 30-second commercial first.

And if you have the stomach for it.

UPDATE: Too late, I saw this warning from Chrenkoff:

A way of caution to all the fellow bloggers trying to demonstrate the apparent absurdity of the claim about flushing Koran down the toilet by pointing out that the holy book is too big to fit through the pipes. I don’t think anyone can assume that Korans were indeed successfully flushed down; it’s enough for a desecration to occur if the books were merely dropped into a bowl and water flushed over them.

 

OK, point taken. But it strikes me as a pretty stupid thing to do. For one thing, when you’re done, you have to fish it back out. Yuck. For another, as Chrenkoff said:

Taunting religious sensibilities of people already thought to be religious fanatics doesn’t sound like a great way to break them or get useful information out of them.

And, as Chrenkoff noted earlier, the accusers aren’t terribly credible to anyone who isn’t predisposed to believing stories of American eeevil. That is, to radical Islamists, the French, and members of the MSM.