Here are the facts:

As editor of The New Republic, Franklin Foer allowed Scott Thomas Beauchamp to publish three stories that were not competently fact-checked. At least one of those that was assigned to his wife to fact-check even though that was a clear conflict of interest. All three of those stories—not just”ShockTroops”— had significant “red flags” in them. These red flags range from the changing of a tire of a vehicle equipped with run-flat tires in “War Bonds,” to several obvious and easily verifiable untrue statements, including the claim of a discovery of a kind of ammunition that do not exist, and absurd evidence for allegations of murder “Dead of Night” that could have been (and were) debunked in less than 30 seconds with a simple Google search.

The bottom line is that the Scott Beauchamp debacle was a test of editorial character for The New Republic under Franklin Foer’s leadership. For over four months, the magazine has answered that challenge by hiding behind anonymous sources, making personal attacks against critics, asserting a a massive conspiracy against them, while covering up conflicting testimony and refusing to answer the hard questions.

Even to the end, Foer continues to blame everyone else for his continuing editorial failures., penning a fourteen-page excuse without a single, “I’m sorry.”

The readers and staff deserve better, and it is past time for Franklin Foer to leave The New Republic.

Bob Owens sums it up succinctly.

In any case, Franklin Foer’s mea culpa provides infinite more transparency than Kathryn Jean Lopez’s account of how the two magazines got it wrong.

I do have to ask though if you’ll be starting a similar crusade in reaction to the National Review’s publication of fraudulent claims that Hezbollah has deployed thousands of armed men to the Christian areas of Beirut?

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

What a bunch of weasels!
It took fourteen pages to come to this concluding paragraph?
Not to mention their constant moaning about the Army’s interference with their investigation or fact-checking.
TNR and Scott Thomas deserve each other.
Had it not been for the obvious bogus stories to begin with, carefully and craftily dissected by milblogs, I would have never known about this rag anyway.