Shocked

...that Newsweek is taking the heat for this one. The newspapers in this country have no backbone-- oh wait, sure they do. It's called corporate sponsorship.

Story:Newsweek reports that US officials are desecrating the Koran. Massive protests around Muslim world. Insert coercive measures from advertisers, denial from the White House (do we ever get anything else?), slander from competing magazines, add in the recent martyrdom of journalism...

Suddenly we've got newspapers willingly taking the blame for US-governmentally-authored, sponsored, and implemented violence.

*This is not free speech. This is thought control.*

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And newspapers are willing to put their industry's legitimacy on trial as well. This has been a recent tactic of the ever-ingenious current administration. You really have to hand it to them, they've done more to control public discussion than... well, than anyone in my recent memory.

Just-in survey: i Google-news-ed newsweek. Virtually ALL of the US media (ABC, NYTimes, Yahoo, Reuters, local papers) are reporting about the retraction. Where's the discussion on the violence?

Right, in the international papers where it belongs. This article came out in January discussing tactics involving smearing menstruation blood on detainees and forcing them to pray (a grave sin for Muslims). Numerous reports have been coming out for months discussing the alarming suicide-attempts there. Other reports discuss how female guards engage in sexually-explicit acts to embarass and desanctify detainees.
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This editorial says it well.
The White House has gone ballistic over the retracted statement in the May 9 Newsweek that "investigators probing abuses at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed" that "interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, placed Qur'ans on toilets and, in at least one case, flushed a holy book down the toilet." White House spokesman Scott McClellan flat-out said Newsweek was responsible for causing the rioting in Afghanistan that led to at least 17 deaths. Newsweek editors appear to have accepted that responsibility. They shouldn't have; the White House is simply changing the subject from abuse at Guantanamo to Newsweek's journalism. It would have been prudent, and more responsible, for Newsweek to have confirmed the story with a second source; that failure gave the White House the opening it has now seized to such good effect.
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Instead, newspapers in this country are writing their own eulogy.