One more post on Elspeth Reeve (Beauchamp)

I ran across a suitable postscript for my tentative final assessment of the Elspeth Reeve portion of the TNR/Scott Thomas/Scott Beauchamp saga.

I had judged that Elspeth Reeve shares some of the fault for the problems at TNR for not taking note of the ethical quagmire of fact-checking hubby's stories.

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.
(The New York Observer)

The blurb above attaches to a subsequent story also printed in the Observer. It makes Reeve appear a bit flakier than I suspected since she appears to stand behind Beauchamp's stories and provides no indication that she realizes that she stepped in ethical doo-doo by accepting the fact checking assignment. Though TNR rightly gets top billing in the blame department on that one.

clipped from www.observer.com

Best wishes to the happy couple; may they leave the TNR snafu far in their wake. And consider careers outside of journalism.

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