c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Did no one at Newsweek consider the difficulty of flushing a book down the toilet? Perhaps the editors assumed American technical ingenuity had developed a commode capable of consuming a Tom Clancy paperback in six seconds. Heck, when they fire that thing up, the suction makes cots in detention cells screech along the floor toward the bars. Was this the toilet for which that famous $700 seat was invented?

Newsweek has retracted its story about the flushed holy book, for all the good it will do.

It’s another hit for the Big Old Media, but this time it wasn’t bloggers who brought them down. Web sites did not spring into action with technical drawings proving the aperture of pipes at Gitmo was too narrow to accommodate bound volumes. No blogger demolished the source’s resume, because he’s anonymous. No one even suggested that the Quran in question was mocked up in Microsoft Word. No, this was self-inflicted: an example of people trying to win a race by shooting themselves in the foot.

The alternative media will profit _ not because of their skepticism, necessarily, but because of the questions they asked about Newsweek’s judgment and motivation. Put simply: What was served by running the story in the first place?

That’s not the point, some would say; news is news, and we cannot censor ourselves if we worry about the reaction. (Unless we’re worried about Red America going on a lynching spree, in which case we have to stop showing pictures of people jumping out of the World Trade Center.) Truth is truth and must be told; if there’s a Marine out there somewhere holding the Quran with the wrong hand, we have to find him and run the picture. Look, religious sensitivities must be respected. (Unless you’re talking about appointments to the federal appellate courts.)

It’s not right to ask whose side the media are on. They’re on the side of America, of course. But it’s a rather perfect version they love _ at least more than the real messy manifestation.

They want the United States to be respected and true to its ideals, and that’s why it’s important to run a little blurb informing the world that .0000000001 percent of its armed forces put a holy book in the loo to get some information from a detainee. (One wonders, if the detainee had ‘fessed up to a plan to bring down the Newsweek headquarters, would the editors have felt relief or regret?)

They want America to be good, which is why the actions of some yahoos on one wacky night in Abu Ghraib must overshadow and define the entirety of the reconstruction effort.

They want the soldiers to win, of course _ of course! But if a Marine shoots an enemy who’s already down but may have a suicide belt, this must lead the news. Future enemies will know we play clean, and do the same. “Play clean” for them means using a fresh scimitar for beheading, but it’s a start.

Everything makes sense from an office high in Manhattan. It’s all quite clear.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter summed up the Big Media position on Don Imus’ show: “I think the larger question that people have to ask is, do they want news organizations out there trying to dig or do they want to take all their information from the government? And we are still, you know, pretty determined, very determined, to be out there digging.”

True. Absolutely true. But to what end?

In any case, the story has been retracted. Some corners of the Muslim world might consider whether desecration allegations on the other side of the planet are worth deadly riots. (Cue the “Final Jeopardy” theme.) After all, if destroying the Quran is a problem, one wonders if there would have been riots had FBI investigators found remnants of the hijackers’ copies in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, Flight 93 and other atrocities carried out in the book’s name.

To which the rioters might ask:

Why would Mossad agents be carrying the Quran?

MO/LF/PH END LILEKS

(James Lileks is a columnist for Newhouse News Service, a blogger and the author of four books.)