Howard Kurtz has an article for the Washington Post on the Scott Beauchamp New Republic scandal: New Republic Disavows Iraq Diarist’s Reports.

After nearly five months of mounting criticism, the New Republic yesterday disavowed reports about petty wartime cruelty in Iraq, saying the magazine had lost faith in the Army private who wrote them.

“We cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them,” Editor Franklin Foer wrote of the dispatches by Scott Thomas Beauchamp. “Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.” Foer said in an interview that he kept waiting for Army investigative documents — some promised by Beauchamp — that never arrived. “I hope our investigation and honest admissions of failure will reassure our readers that we’re committed to the highest standards,” he said. …

In the New Republic case, Foer acknowledged a key “mistake” in checking on whether Beauchamp lied or exaggerated in writing that U.S. soldiers had made fun of a disfigured woman, run over dogs for sport and played with an Iraqi child’s skeletal remains. Foer said Beauchamp’s wife, Elspeth Reeve, then a researcher at the magazine, was assigned “a large role” in checking the story. While Reeve acted in good faith, he said, “there was a clear conflict of interest.” …

“We never should have put Beauchamp in this situation,” Foer wrote. “He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training.”

So what’s Franklin Foer’s excuse, as a “trained journalist” and editor, for not noticing the outlandish nature of the stories Beauchamp concocted? At the very least, such lurid tales should have set off warning sirens for any ethical editor, and reinforced the need for scrupulous fact-checking before publication.