TNR's Foer on Beauchamp Retraction: 'There's a Baseline Level of Trust You Have in Writers'
New Republic editor Frank Foer's nearly 7,000-word retraction of his magazine's Scott Thomas Beauchamp stories has already received plenty of attention since appearing this weekend. But it's not immediately clear what precipitated its publication.
Based on Mr. Foer's account, it does not appear that TNR's four-and-a-half-month investigation turned up any new inconsistencies in Mr. Beauchamp's stories. Nor has Mr. Beauchamp confessed to making anything up.
So why is TNR backing off now?
In an interview this afternoon, Mr. Foer told Media Mob that while there was no evidence to suggest that Mr. Beauchamp had fabricated any of his Iraq dispatches, TNR’s editors had lost confidence in their correspondent over the course of the fall, and had reached a dead-end with their investigation.
"Aside from the Iraq-Kuwait mistake, which is extremely serious and did a lot to throw our confidence in him, we didn't find other mistakes," Mr. Foer continued, referring to an anecdote which Mr. Beauchamp had originally described as taking place in a Baghdad mess hall, but which he later admitted occurred in Kuwait. "We just had questions that we weren't able to answer to our satisfaction. We wanted a layer of evidence and corroboration that went beyond what we were able to obtain via him and our own reporting."
Mr. Foer continued: "We kind of reached the point of diminishing returns in our reporting, so we felt like we needed to render a final verdict based on the evidence that we had."
Asked why TNR had not demanded this layer of evidence and corroboration before Mr. Beauchamp's pieces were published, Mr. Foer said, "There's a baseline level of trust you have in writers when you assign them pieces."
Mr. Foer said he had trusted Mr. Beauchamp—then 23 and without journalistic training—largely on the recommendation of Elspeth Reeve, who at the time had been working at TNR for six months as a reporter-researcher.
As Mr. Foer noted in today's account, Ms. Reeve married Mr. Beauchamp soon after putting him in touch with the magazine. Later, she was assigned to fact-check "Shock Troops," one of the articles for which Mr. Beauchamp has come under fire.
Mr. Foer said he had asked Mr. Beauchamp to send him copies of the statements he'd made to the Army regarding events he'd described in his TNR pieces, but that Mr. Beauchamp had failed to hand them over.
As a result, said Mr. Foer, "Over time, our confidence in Beauchamp did diminish." He went on: "We were told he had a legal right to obtain them and he told us he was working on obtaining them."
Mr. Foer said he has no plans to resign from the magazine, and that no one at TNR has asked him to.
Resign.
Resign.
Resign.
Resign.
Resign.
Resign.
First, readers should be happy that I'm not another sock-puppet of the same individual who keeps writing: Resign.
Second, this business of "journalistic training" is farcical. Those without a journalism MA generally know that it's not right to lie (Beauchamp excepted); conversely, many with such "journalistic training" lie for a living.
TNR and Foer get my support for its rigorous investigation to find the truth. Beauchamp and his wife get a huge thumbs down. Conservative rightwing bloggers, two thumbs down--this story is over. If only the government responsible for sending Beauchamp over there in the first place had the same willingness to check things out and admit mistakes.
Here's the REAL story to follow: National Review reporter Thomas Smith has been exposed as a fabulist for plainly fictitious claims
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/02/nro/index.html
Franklin: Editors get occasionally burned, but they are supposed to be servants to the truth. When Glass burned the New Republic, it apologized and said steps would be taken. They were not.
You got burned again and this time you even tried to cover it up. You knew the woman with the burned face did not exist and you sat on that evidence. You questioned the Bradley manufacter about its performance characteristics without showing him the Beauchamp articles (he later said a Bradley would not perform the way Beauchamp claimed). You actively tried to hide the truth to cover your own butt.
You should be fired.
And as for NRO, that story just broke. If they screwed up, then heads should roll. But that is no excuse for The New Republic.
What is this NRO you speak of?
The NRO story did NOT just break, do yourself a favor and get your facts straight: the National Review fabulist, Thomas Smith, was called into question more than SIX WEEKS AGO. Far more egregious reporting than Beauchamp's...
re: David (not verified): precisely what, exactly, do you mean by the "rigorous investigation to find the truth"?
In July, Foer claimed back in July "the article was rigorously edited and fact-checked before it was published."
We know now this this was a lie, and that the fact-checker was indeed the author's wife.
If you can get through his article, you will note that Foer essentially argues that their inability to find anything or anyone credible to back up their story was due to a military conspiracy spanning four bases in three countries involving dozens of soldiers, from privates to colonels. If this is such a big conspiracy, why didn't the TNR send someone to Iraq to investigate?
Foer admits that he only person he could find who would back up the story about the disfigured woman had been washed out of the service due to mental instability.
Don't also forget that Foer claims that part of his "vigourous fact checking" was to send the story to some other journalist first, who had no first hand knowledge of anything, but siad that "it sounded like it could be true." Is that what passes for "journalism" these days: ask someone if a story sounds true?
Foer, the TNR and people like you have attacked critics of the TNR with the usual smears ("thugs," "right wing nutjobs..")...and yet everything the bloggers said turns out to be right.
Even Media Matters agrees that Foer and TNR are a collective disgrace. If Foer had a shred of integrity, he'd resign; no doubt, there'd be a job waiting for him at CNN.
Yes the NRO story did break, and when it's authenticity was questioned, both the author and NRO stated that yes parts of it were false.
That's not what TNR did. TNR covered up the fact that the story was obviously false. They attacked critics as partisan liars, despite evidence to the contrary. Then they hide in their offices for four and half months, before meekly offering up a half-hearted retraction.
Foer's just a kid with no experience of the military whatsoever. The kid got sucked in on the story because it was too good not to be true. Hey, you gotta filll that back page with something.
But it is also clear that the kid also hid the truth from his readers for a long, long time, and when he finally had to front it he twisted in his own fumes. Foer's like the guilty busted teenager who pleads "Guilty... but with an explanation."
The first paragraph says that TNR could find no evidence to prove the stories false. There is no mention made that apparently in almost 5 months they could also find no independent evidence to corroborate the stories. Don't journalists have an obligation to be able to prove their facts.
If you'd been paying any attention to TNR's personnel changes over the years, you'd recognize that TNR is the AAA farm club for bigger and better-capitalized publications like The New Yorker. In recent months Ryan Lizza and the redoubtable James Woods, easily the best literary critic in this country, both graduated to the NYer, joining former exec editor Rick Hertzberg there. Foer more than any TNR editor in recent memory has done a superb job in improving the style, range and depth of the magazine to the point that, with any increase in investment and savvy on the ad sales side, TNR may well join the ranks of large glossies like the New Yorker. Only in the blinkered little world of the blogblatherers would it make any sense at all to ditch FF.
re Foer is a genius (not verified): Frank, is that you?
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