Scott Thomas Beauchamp

In an interview Friday, U.S. Army private Scott Thomas Beauchamp's wife Elspeth Reeve, a former reporter-researcher at The New Republic, told the Observer that she was excited when someone at the magazine assigned her to fact-check one of her husband's dispatches from Iraq.

“I was like, 'Sweet! I can talk to Scott on TNR’s dime!'” Ms. Reeve said.

Ms. Reeve was working at TNR when Mr. Beauchamp--whose articles described soldiers killing dogs and mocking wounded civilians--was accused by critics of fabricating some of his material.

Mr. Foer has since written and published a 7,000-word piece retracting Mr. Beauchamp's articles for TNR, noting that assigning Ms. Reeve to fact-check her husband's work was a mistake.

Make sure to read tomorrow's print edition of the Observer for more on Mr. Foer's retraction, as well as more from Ms. Reeve on what went wrong with her husband's controversial articles.

New Republic editor Frank Foer's nearly 7,000-word retraction of his magazine's Scott Thomas Beauchamp stories has already received plenty of attention since appearing this weekend. But it's not immediately clear what precipitated its publication.

Based on Mr. Foer's account, it does not appear that TNR's four-and-a-half-month investigation turned up any new inconsistencies in Mr. Beauchamp's stories. Nor has Mr. Beauchamp confessed to making anything up.

So why is TNR backing off now?

In an interview this afternoon, Mr. Foer told Media Mob that while there was no evidence to suggest that Mr. Beauchamp had fabricated any of his Iraq dispatches, TNR’s editors had lost confidence in their correspondent over the course of the fall, and had reached a dead-end with their investigation.  read more »

New Republic editor Franklin Foer has offered an in-depth look at the magazine's painstaking efforts to verify its three Baghdad Diarist columns, written by Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a soldier in Iraq.  Conservative bloggers had challenged some of the anecdotes described in the columns, and Mr. Foer now concludes:

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity--which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

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.

The magazine may have erred by running the columns orginally, but it's hard not to conclude that, since then, it's been admirably forthright and energetic in its efforts to get to the truth.  

Last week, New Republic editor Franklin Foer released a statement detailing the results of an internal investigation of columns written by Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who is stationed in Iraq.  read more »