I want to briefly address the Newsweek Koran-flushing controversy. First, a review. The story was a disaster from a journalistic perspective. We still don’t know whether a military interrogator actually flushed a Koran down a toilet or not — only that such an incident will not be described in a forthcoming military report. Nor do we know whether the Newsweek story actually triggered deadly rioting in Afghanistan, a claim that was widely reported in the media even though it was contradicted by the chair of the Joint Chiefs.

In the end, journalists must do better. But the Bush administration’s continuing effort to use these mistakes to delegitimize the press as a political institution is even more troubling, as Jacob Weisberg notes:

[T]he problem with the Bush administration excoriating Newsweek’s insensitivity to Islam isn’t just hypocrisy. There’s a larger issue of bad faith and an underlying lack of appreciation for the necessary role of a free and independent press. With increasing forcefulness, Bush has tried to undermine the legitimacy of the media, or at least that subculture within it that shows any tendency to challenge him. When the Bushies say there ought to be more of a check on the Fourth Estate, they aren’t really asking for more care and accuracy on the part of journalists. They’re expressing frustration that they still have to put up with criticism at all.

Let me go back to Chapter 2 of All the President’s Spin to put this incident in a larger perspective:

The administration makes little secret of its disdain for the press, going so far as to openly question the legitimacy of the media’s role in American politics. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the New Yorker, “They don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election… I don’t believe [the press has] a check-and-balance function.” Rather than viewing journalists as performing a public service, the White House sees them as a hostile force chasing the next headline regardless of fairness or accuracy.

This viewpoint guides the administration’s approach to relations with the media… George W. Bush’s disdain for the press goes further than any president since Richard Nixon. By denying the need for democratic accountability in word and deed, the White House has subverted the notion that the government should have to answer for its actions and statements through any mechanism other than the ballot box.

Just as they did with the CBS National Guard memo story, the White House is using the Newsweek item to try to discredit all critical press reporting. And that is dangerous in a democracy.