It's said that those who fail to learn from History are doomed to repeat it. That more than anything may be the truest tale behind TNR's Franklin Foer and how he handled the Scott Beauchamp issue. None of this needed to happen and, TNR, a part of new media in its on line form, made the bulk of any mistakes after publication of Beauchamp's diaries, not before.
Foer could have saved everyone a lot of trouble by simply being transparent and he could have done that without betraying Scott Beauchamp, or his identity. It works like this: Hello, Army public information officer, we have these stories here. We can't divulge the identity of the author and we've done our best to validate them, what say you? Take a week, or two and get back to us.
Business has learned how to get in front of controversies like this, media has not. But it should. If Foer had done that, TNR, not the Weekly Standard would now be publishing the basic inability on the part of the Military to confirm the stories and it wouldn't need to include Beauchamp's real name.
TNR would be looking like an honest broker between one soldier and a confirming contact or two and the Army, without playing either side. And, as a magazine, they could pull that off. Instead, they walled themselves off, pushed back against the tide instead of swimming with it and, as usual, they were pulled under, taking a rather sad Scott Beauchamp with them in the process. I actually do feel sorry for Beauchamp on one level, he is, after all, an early twenty-something kid.
It's Foer's judgment that is the most troubling here, not Beauchamps. He never appeared to have much good judgment from the start. The whole thing is best summed up here via Hugh Hewitt's blog. Whether it's time for Foer to go, I don't know. But it is time for media to learn from past mistakes and realize that transparency is the key to credibility. Is that too much to ask?
Transparency is the only thing that can save The New Republic, a trait that is not imbued in Franklin Foer as demonstrated by the way he has handled the Beauchamp affair from the beginning. It is time for him to go.
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