When Michael Goldfarb, a blogger for The Weekly Standard, left me a message on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-July, I didn’t know him or his byline. And I certainly didn’t anticipate that his message would become the starting point for a controversy.
A day earlier, The New Republic had published a piece titled “Shock Troops.” It appeared on the magazine’s back page, the “Diarist” slot, which is reserved for short first-person meditations. “Shock Troops” bore the byline Scott Thomas, which we identified as a pseudonym for a soldier then serving in Iraq. Thomas described how war distorts moral judgments. To illustrate his point, he narrated three disturbing anecdotes. In one, he and his comrades cracked vulgar jokes about a woman with a scarred face while she sat in close proximity. In another, a soldier paraded around with the fragment of an exhumed skull on his head. A final vignette described a driver of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle who took pride in running over dogs.
Goldfarb said he had been contacted by tipsters who thought these scenarios sounded concocted by a writer with an overactive imagination–or perhaps by a total fabulist.
Daily Pundit waded through this fourteen page (!!!) farrago of whining, self-justifying drivel so you wouldn’t have to. Here’s the thumbnail takeaway:
1. Scott Beauchamp, on the recommendation of his then girlfriend, one of our intern-fact-checkers, wrote us several “reports” from Iraq, which were called into questions by “the right wing.”
2. His stories were fact-checked - by his girl friend who later became his wife.
3. We fact-checked them by asking him over the phone if they were true. He said of course they were, and provided other voices who agreed with him.
4. For some reason, this “re-reporting” didn’t satisfy the vast right wing porn/fag conspiracy that was questioning them, so we fact-checked even further by asking some other reporters in the area if they might or could have happened. These other reporters said there was some degree of possibility that something like them could have occurred.
5. But that still didn’t satisfy those maniacal conservative whackjobs, and now the brutal Army stepped in and began to suppress poor Scott’s rights. One of their officers even gave Confederate Yankee and us entirely diametrical reports about what the military investigation had discovered.
6. Sadly, this whole mess fell apart, and no actual witnesses have ever undergone face-to-face interviews corroborating poor Scott’s “reporting.”
7. And now even poor Scott won’t back any of this stuff up any more.
8. So, sorry, but we’re going to have to retract those stories.
9. But what do you right-wing whack-job military-loving bastards want? I mean, we had his wife fact check those stories, we asked him if they were true, and we even talked to some unverifiable people over the phone who said they were true as well. In God’s name, what more would you have us do?
Funniest unanswered question:
Did we have a Jayson Blair on our hands–or, closer to home, another Stephen Glass, the fabulist who did so much to tarnish this magazine’s reputation ten years ago?
Two answers present themselves: 1. Yes. 2. What reputation?
UPDATE: Loads of links.
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