In case you missed it, take a look at the unfolding media story of The New Republic’s Scott Thomas Beauchamp diaries.
These were reports from a soldier in the field in Iraq reporting on some of the uglier sides of the US military’s footprint on the ground in Iraq. Imagining that every story that doesn’t kowtow to the Bush personality cult is another Rathergate in the making, the rightwing blogosphere exploded with a wave of accusations and fabrications, all alleging in one fashion or another that the stories were made up. The charges even got recycled and trumpeted in the Washington Post.
Unfortunately for them, TNR did a in-depth re-fact-check of the pieces (which given the Glass backstory, was, I am sure, extremely thorough) and with the exception of one relatively minor error they all check out.
And it turns out that the Weekly Standard, which did one of the slimiest hatchet-jobs under the byline of Michael Goldfarb, relied in large part on the word of a former porn star-cum-prostitute (who is currently being investigated by the Marine Corps for soliciting private donations to fund a deployment to Iraq he apparently never made) to level its charges that the TNR pieces were fabrications.
No word on whether the Standard does investigations of pieces that have run in their pages. Maybe the Standard’s Executive Editor Fred Barnes can enlighten us.
Media Matters has a good wrap up of the whole story here.
