Journalistic ethics

From Anne Appelbaum's story in WaPo today, on the new codification of "fake but accurate":

Now, it is possible that no interrogator at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed pages of the Koran down the toilet, as the now-retracted Newsweek story reported -- although several former Guantanamo detainees have alleged just that. It is also possible that Newsweek reporters relied too much on an uncertain source, or that the magazine confused the story with (confirmed) reports that prisoners themselves used Korans to block toilets as a form of protest.

But surely the larger point is not the story itself but that it was so eminently plausible, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and everywhere else.

Did you catch that? People who believe Saddam's minister of information about American troops not invading Baghdad, people who believe that Jews knocked down the WTC and use the blood of Muslims and Christian children to make Passover bread, people who watch al-Jazeera, these people are so discerning and so informed that if they are willing to believe a horrible sotyr about the US and then riot and kill their own people over it -- these people are the barometer of truth.

Now, she's probably right you can't expect a little ol' weekly rag like Newsweek to, you know, fact check. Maybe by trying to flush a book down a toilet themselves. (And do the stories these terrorists come up with make you wonder about their familiarity with indoor plumbing and personal hygiene?) But at some point, you would expect Americans to act like Americans. Not like they're mentally rioting in Islmabad or writing for La Monde. Is that too much of a journalistic ethic to expect?