Mon, May 23, 2005 at 8:02:17 pm
Former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee has words for Newsweek: Ben Bradlee Criticizes ‘Newsweek’ on Sourcing Debacle. (Hat tip: Newsbeat 1.)
NEW YORK - Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post and a onetime Newsweek D.C. bureau chief, criticized the news magazine for taking too long to retract its recent, inadequately sourced Koran-abuse item. He added that under certain circumstances he would reveal a source who lied to a reporter and came out against single-source stories, in a conversation Monday with E&P.
Some (most recently, commentator David Gergen) have called for Newsweek to reveal its source on the retracted Koran-abuse story. When asked if he would ever reveal a confidential source that had been wrong or lied, Bradlee said, “If a guy led you over a cliff on purpose, I think I’d get even with him.” But, he added, he would not “swear a vendetta” for a source who simply made a mistake. “I’m not prepared to say it is an absolute rule,” he said.
As for how Newsweek handled the retraction, Bradlee said, “they could have been quicker to tell it all. If they’d cleaned it up the first day, it would have been over with.” Bradlee told E&P, referring to the magazine’s retraction of a May 9 item in its Periscope section, “The first retraction was a semi-retraction. You are either right or wrong or you don’t know. And if you don’t know, you shouldn’t have printed it.”