ANOTHER LIBERAL MEDIA BASTION BITES THE DUST

Bad news rarely gets better with age.  If the youthful editors of The New Republic had remembered that, they might not now be worrying about their jobs.

Editor Franklin Foer and Executive Editor Peter Scoblic got some really bad news September 6 in a telephone conversation with Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who had been the magazine's "Baghdad Diarist."

Writing under the pseudonym "Scott Thomas," Pvt. Beauchamp last July described three instances of shocking behavior by himself and other soldiers in his unit.  He and another soldier made fun in the mess hall of their base of a woman whose face had been disfigured by an IED; a soldier had paraded around wearing the skull of a child he had found in a mass grave, and the driver of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle deliberately ran over dogs for fun.

Veterans doubted the incidents could have occurred without instant correction by the superiors of the soldiers involved, and in the case of the Bradley story, they noted it was physically impossible for the vehicle to be driven in the manner Pvt. Beauchamp described.

Mr. Foer told Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard the mess hall incident took place at Forward Operating Base Falcon in Baghdad.  This led to an Army investigation which identified Pvt. Beauchamp as the Baghdad Diarist. 

"An investigation of the allegations was conducted by the command and found to be false," Col Steven Boylan, an Army public affairs officer, said Aug. 3.  "Members of (Beauchamp's) platoon and company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims."  Citing Pvt. Beauchamp's privacy rights, the Army refused to release details of its investigation.

Despite this, Mr. Foer stood by Pvt. Beauchamp.  "We've talked to military personnel directly involved in the events Scott Thomas Beauchamp described, and they corroborated his account," Mr. Foer told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz Aug. 7.  Mr. Foer accused the Army of "short-circuiting" the magazine's efforts to confirm Pvt. Beauchamp's stories by restricting access to him.

Then someone leaked to Matt Drudge the transcript of the telephone conversation between Mr. Foer and Mr. Scoblic and Pvt. Beauchamp, and the Army's report of its investigation.  He published them on his website Wednesday.  And with that the emphasis shifted from the veracity of Pvt. Beauchamp to the integrity of The New Republic's editors.

Pvt. Beauchamp made it clear he is free to talk to the news media, but doesn't want to.  He refused to defend his stories, despite this threat from Mr. Scoblic:  "Because you're not going to talk to us anymore about the piece we just can't, in good conscience, continue to defend it.  And so the way it ends is there is going to be another round of stories and the story is going to be that an author lied to his editors.  And they decided that they can't trust him anymore."

The Army's report indicated Pvt. Beauchamp had signed a statement admitting his articles were exaggerations and contained falsehoods.

Had the editors followed through on Mr. Scoblic's threat, there would be red faces at TNR, but nothing more.  Many could have viewed the editors, albeit negligent in fact checking, more as victims than as perpetrators of a hoax. 

The innocent editors were too trusting of Pvt. Beauchamp, but he was one of them (a young antiwar liberal), who had been vouched for by his wife, a popular TNR staffer.  What he wrote corresponded with what antiwar liberals tend to believe about American soldiers.  No one on staff knew enough about the military to see the red flags the veterans saw. 

The story would have ended with the editors' acknowledgment they could no longer stand by Pvt. Beauchamp's stories. But the editors told their readers nothing about their conversation with Pvt. Beauchamp.

"The documents posted by Drudge reveal that The New Republic's editors have known for several weeks that the central anecdote of the story was untrue, that the other anecdotes were deeply suspect, and that the author was no longer standing by his work," wrote Mr. Goldfarb. 

"And yet they remained publicly silent even though they had long ago promised to be open and forthcoming…Worse still, they asked Beauchamp to cancel pending interviews with the Washington Post and Newsweek, lest their complicity in Beauchamp's slanders come to light."

The editors evidently hoped the story would go away if everybody kept their mouths shut.  What's gone away instead is their credibility.

The New Republic is one of the founding bastions of American liberalism, founded in 1914.  If it continues such antics, it surely will not get close to its centennial.