by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
May 19, 2004
Last Friday the board of the British tabloid, the Daily Mirror, fired its controversial editor, Piers Morgan, 39. Immediately following the board meeting, Morgan, who had been the paper’s editor for the past eight years was quickly escorted out of the building by security staff.
Morgan was fired for publishing and then defending fake pictures of British troops torturing prisoners in Iraq. almost as soon as the pictures were published military sources said the uniforms and equipment that were shown in the photos were not available to the troops in Iraq. In spite of this, the former editor continued to defend the authenticity of the photographs and the newspaper’s decision to publish them. When it was proved conclusively that the pictures could not have been taken in Iraq, Morgan was given the sack and the Daily Mirror apologized on its front page the next day. as Col. David Black, the former commanding officer of the regiment that was wrongly accused of torturing Iraqis said, "It is time the ego of an editor is measured against the life of a soldier".
Contrast this with the same problem that occurred at the Boston Globe. On May 11, a Boston city councillor held a press conference and showed pictures of women being raped by american soldiers. Unlike other media outlets who refused to publish the photos because they were unable to be verified, the Globe printed them the next day, right along with pictures and the story of american Nick Berg who was beheaded by al Qaeda. It is still unknown exactly where the rape pictures came from, but it is believed that they were shot in Hungary for display on a pornographic website.
after the pictures were published, Editor Martin Baron said, "We’re not firing anybody". If the Boston Globe had acted like the Daily Mirror, Baron would have been the first to go. The Globe’s solution to the mistake was to give the paper’s ombudsman, Christine Chinlund a column to explain the error. Chinlund concluded that it was a series of human errors (what other errors could there have been?) that allowed the pictures to be published. She seemed more apologetic about the graphic nature of the rape pics than she was about the fact that they were false. Chinlund also denied that the Globe has an anti-american or anti-Bush bias, accusations of which had appeared on talk radio and web blogs.
What is interesting about the Boston Globe is that it is one of the newspapers that have editorially called for U.S. Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to step down over the allegations of abuse at abu Ghraib. Of course no one has alleged that Rumsfeld had taken an active part in the abuse. Calls for his resignation or firing are based on the fact that higher ups should be held accountable for the actions of their subordinates.
The Boston Globe does not obviously subscribe to the chain of command principle when it comes to how their newspaper is run and the respectable broadsheet could learn a thing or two from the British trash tabloid. a self serving column about how the paper is not anti-american, just doesn’t seem to cut it.