Regret the Error

Fun with photos

Editor's Note: In our print edition, several captions for the photographs accompanying this report were inadvertantly transposed. Martin Kramer's photograph is identified as Norman Podhoretz; Daniel Pipes's photograph is identified as Kramer; Peter Berkowitz's photograph is identified as Pipes; Nile Gardiner's photograph is identified as Berkowitz's and Podhoretz's photograph is identified as Gardiner's. NEWSWEEK regrets the errors.

Daniel Pipes has the original image up on his website. He notes that, "There are six pictures in all on the page and five of the six captions are wrong; only that of Robert Kasten is correct. Aggregating so many errors at once takes real talent – but count on Newsweek."
He's not a fan.

Thanks, Jim!

Update on Alexis Debat story

The New York Times today published a piece by Bill Carter that contains more details about Debat's denials and ABC News' efforts to investigate his previous work for the network. Background on this story here. From the Times:

Alexis Debat, the former consultant to ABC News who has been accused of fabricating interviews with American political figures for a French magazine, strongly defended his reputation yesterday in a telephone interview...
Mr. Debat fought back yesterday against many of the charges against him, saying that he never conducted fake interviews, claiming that the issue of his Ph.D. degree arose from a misunderstanding with the Sorbonne (though he acknowledged he never received a diploma). He also said he welcomed ABC’s investigation.
“I am totally cooperating with them,” he said. “I am 100 percent confident that there will be no inaccuracies found in my reporting.”
But Rue 89, the French Web site that first reported suspicions that an interview with Senator Barack Obama was fake, continued to report new details that undermined Mr. Debat’s credibility. And the French Ministry of Defense tried to debunk his claims to have been an official or adviser in the ministry, saying he was little more than an intern...
ABC News has sent a producer to Pakistan as part of its second investigation into reports involving Mr. Debat. One report it is re-examining concerned a guerrilla organization called Jundullah, which, ABC reported in April, had the support of the United States and Pakistan for operations that led to the kidnapping and murder of several Iranian officials... Brian Ross, the correspondent who worked most closely with Mr. Debat, said the Jundullah story had many sources.
“We’re only worried about the things Debat supplied, not about the substance of that story,” he said.
...So far, ABC has found nothing that would undermine the stories Mr. Debat worked on, Mr. Ross said last night. But he acknowledged that as the stories of fabrications continue to roll in, the network “at some point has to question whether anything he said can be believed.”
ABC did cite some accounts that Mr. Debat accurately tried to warn the network against reporting. In one instance, ABC believed it had information that a terror suspect named Matiur Rehman had been captured in Pakistan in August 2006. Mr. Debat warned ABC it was not true. A day after the report was broadcast, ABC retracted it because Mr. Rehman had not been captured after all.
During the interview, Mr. Debat also denounced challenges of interviews with subjects including former President Bill Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York that Mr. Debat supplied to the French magazine Politique Internationale. All of those subjects have said they never met with Mr. Debat.
According to his account, the magazine set up the interviews, asked him to submit questions and translate the answers, and put his byline on the results. The editor of Politique Internationale, Patrick Wajsman, has been quoted widely saying that the explanation is untrue and that Mr. Debat is “a grand liar.”
Mr. Debat’s account was further undermined yesterday in a new report from Rue 89, which published an e-mail message from him to Politique Internationale discussing the interview with Mr. Bloomberg, in which he wrote: “The interview with Michael Bloomberg went well. It lasted a little less than one hour but I managed to go over all our questions.”
When asked about the report yesterday, Mr. Debat said, “I have no recollection of these e-mails.”
Similarly, when asked why he had told a reporter for Rue 89, Guillemette Faure, that his Ph.D. had come from the University of Edenvale in Britain, Mr. Debat said: “I never told her that. I know that university is a fake.”

Rome, not room

Librarian of Congress James Billington was misquoted in Wednesday's article "Billington's Tenure One for the Books." He said the Library's goal is to bring "Greece into Rome," not bring "Greece into the room."

Fabrication scandal hits (now former) ABC News consultant

Just as we were thinking that the summer had been relatively quiet, along comes what appears to be a serious fabrication scandal. It started with a story by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post about how Alexis Debat, a former French defense official and consultant to ABC News, faked an interview with Barack Obama. Now it has turned into a widening scandal.
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News has a comprehensive look at Debat's other transgressions. ABC also published an account about the fake Obama interview. Then it followed up with a rather shocking report:

Former President Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have added their names to the list of people who say they were the subjects of fake interviews published in a French foreign affairs journal under the name of Alexis Debat, a former ABC News consultant.
"This guy is just sick," said Patrick Wajsman, the editor of the magazine, Politique Internationale, a prestigious publication that has been in business for 29 years. Wajsman said he was removing all articles with Debat's byline from the magazine's Web site.

That same piece notes what ABC News is doing to examine his work for the network:

ABC News says it is reviewing all stories in which Debat has played a role.
"We investigated and could not establish his academic credentials," said ABC News senior vice president Jeffrey Schneider. Schneider said ABC News began a review of all of his work as a consultant but that so far, "our initial review has found that the information he provided ABC News checked out and was backed up by other sources."
Debat, who resigned yesterday as a senior fellow on counterterrorism issues at the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank, told ABCNews.com his only mistake was to allow his name to be put on interviews done by others.
Debat admitted he did not conduct interviews with Clinton, Pelosi, Bloomberg, Gates, Greenspan or Annan.

Let's hope ABC News continues to investigate Debat and delivers a full report. FishBowlNY also has an interesting email exchange with Debat.

But is it a chopper?

Our April cover featured a photo of clothing designer Quinn Thompson astride his motorcycle, which he described as a "Harley chopper." We've since heard from several motorcycle enthusiasts among our readers, who insist that Thompson's bike is neither a Harley nor a chopper. (Thompson's bike features a motor made by S&S and a Harley-Davidson wishbone frame.) "It's not even near the size needed to be considered a chopper," says reader William Xavier. "Someone there obviously doesn't know motorcycles." Intrigued, we checked with experts at the American Motorcyclist Association (amadirectlink.com), the Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum (motorcyclemuseum.org), and custom-bike manufacturer Orange County Choppers (orangecountychoppers.com) in Montgomery, N.Y. All agreed that any customized motorcycle of the cruiser style will be called a chopper by some. "It's really a matter of opinion there's no official standard," says the AMA's Lance Oliver. "There will always be those who argue that a 'true' chopper has to meet a list of additional criteria. These are the kinds of things that we motorcycle nuts can debate endlessly among ourselves over the campfire."

The burden of the press

In the article "Makenna's Heart" [September 3], it was stated that detaching one of two large veins to the heart and reconnecting it elsewhere placed more of a burden on the heart's right side; rather, it reduced the burden. Link

Bad for business

In the Sept. 4 special report Community Banking, a story on page 10 "The Dangers of Buying an Unfamiliar Business," mistakenly said OceanFirst Financial restated its earnings for all of last year to reflect a reserve for repurchasing loans from its mortgage unit. It actually revised its fourth-quarter earnings before submitting documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also, the unit had been making subprime mortgages before OceanFirst acquired it in 2000.
The same story also implied that Frank Schiraldi, a Sandler O'Neill analyst, was talking specifically about OceanFirst when he said that managers failed to properly monitor their subsidiary's activities and did not understand the risks of subprime lending. Rather than a particular institution, he was talking more generally about problems banks can face with independent subsidiaries. Link

Is he still a hero?

In the Do Right Men story, "Turn Up the Heat" [August 2007], members of The Racing Team were misidentified. They are, from left, Calvin Gravely, Micheal Harris, Chris Justice. In addition, the profession of Antoine Stanford, featured in Do Right Men's Everyday Heroes, was listed incorrectly. He is a federal sales representative, not a policeman. We regret these errors.

Why not?

The photo of a dead soldier that accompanied "No Fortune for the War's Famous Photographer" [July 2-9] should have been attributed to Alexander Gardner and not used in the story.

Know your Persians

In "American Dreamers" (July 30), we mistakenly included Iran among a list of nations in the Arab world. NEWSWEEK regrets the error. Link