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An overinflated cover story

By Mark Obbie

Newsweek got my attention with a law-of-war cover story by two heavyweights -- Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas -- not to mention an unusual (for Newsweek) editorial illustration on the cover, by the talented Victor Juhasz. But the story is kind of a nothing-burger. First, Taylor and Thomas set up a straw-man premise: that President-elect Obama's promise to reverse the Dick Cheney executive-power campaign "may not be so simple." Well, duh. Who said it would be simple? Then, this is what passes for original reporting in the piece:Hard to argue with that. Also hard to get excited about it. What else could we expect them to say? It's the sort of inarguable but meaningless summary that a management consultant might trot out in public, so as to avoid accountability for specifics.The reporter duo does provide a smart, brief flyover of the key issues confronting the new administration -- detainees, torture, and surveillance among them -- and they write with the authority (if not an excess of opinion) on these topics. But the way the magazine played the story smacks of a hijacking: An over-enthusiastic editor saw a coverline and an illustration before he actually saw the story. Let the air out of it, and it's a reasonably interesting but short op-ed.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on January 12, 2009 (boomark / email).