WASHINGTON -- A day after Newsweek magazine used the R-word -- retraction -- in disavowing a report that interrogators at the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed down a toilet a copy of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, the chorus of condemnation for the original news item spread from the Bush administration and conservative bloggers to journalism schools.

Yesterday, as the U.S. government tried to control the damage from the story, some journalism educators were as scathing in their criticism of the magazine as was White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who said, "There is a certain journalistic standard that should be met, and in this case, it was not."

Others, while criticizing Newsweek for shoddy journalism, worried that the incident would be used by the administration to shift focus from what they say is the larger problem of insensitivity to Islam in the war on terror.

In reporting May 1 in the magazine's "Periscope" section that interrogators had flushed the Quran down a toilet in an attempt to shake Islamic suspected terrorists, Newsweek fired a journalistic shot heard round the Muslim world. At least 15 people were killed in protests in Afghanistan, and the parliament in Pakistan, a U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, passed a resolution condemning the reported desecration.

Newsweek -- after reporting in its current issue that its source no longer was sure that he had read of the incident in the report cited in initial story -- on Monday issued this more categorical statement by editor Mark Whitaker: "Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay."

Several journalism experts consulted by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette yesterday were critical of Newsweek for the original item, blaming it on a rush to scoop the competition or an ignorance of Islamic sensitivities, or both.

"From the outside, it seems to be to about scoop-mania," said Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. "I'm guessing that what happens is that you're an editor in the Washington bureau, and somebody says, 'I've got something on a great story that nobody else has,' and you don't care if it's about religion or anything else."

Lemann rejected the notion that other reported incidents of humiliation of prisoners because of their Islamic beliefs gave Newsweek cause to think that this report was plausible. "That's exactly what we're not supposed to do as journalists," he said.

But other journalism educators said prior incidents in which Islamic prisoners were humiliated because of their religion did put Newsweek's embarrassment in a different light.

"To focus on the journalism question is to miss the larger picture," said Diane Winston, who holds the Knight chair in media and religion at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. "The big picture is U.S. policy of the use of religion as a weapon of war. The reason why this story was believable, regardless of whether it was accurate, was because it was part of a larger context where Muslim prisoners at [Iraq's] Abu Ghraib [prison] and Guantanamo have been subjected to continual harassment.

"If you read the already-accepted stories about menstrual blood being rubbed on prisoners or prisoners being sexually humiliated by women, this story became believable in that context, and that's the scary part," Winston said. "The fact that this has gone on doesn't let Newsweek off the hook if the story was wrong, but it does make it more understandable why they thought the story had validity."

Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., was likewise critical of Newsweek -- but didn't stop there.

"The Newsweek story clearly wasn't sourced sufficiently, given the sensitivity of the issue," Silk said. "They seem to have claimed one source for it. The Periscope is a kind of gossip column, so it would appear from an outsider's standpoint that this is a somewhat-lower standard of proof when it comes to Periscope compared to other stories. But if you're using that column to give not-quite-as-well-sourced or nailed-down tidbits, then you'd better be sure of what you're talking about.

"The only extenuation I would give them is that there has been reporting of some really horrible abuse of Islam in the treatment of prisoners. That makes it more plausible that such an event could have occurred. And it raises the question of how come the Bush administration doesn't express more extensive outrage over that, by criticizing anyone in the military who is using religion that way."

For the administration to criticize Newsweek, Silk said, takes "a lot of gall, with everything that happened at Abu Ghraib."

Lemann declined to criticize the Bush administration for making the most of Newsweek's embarrassment. "They're having fun, they're pushing back," he said. "It's their right.

"Newsweek has made a big thing of the fact that the administration didn't wave them off this story," he said. "My sense of the administration's thinking is that they would say, 'Why should we? We're not in business to do these folks favors. If they're about to take a swan dive into an empty swimming pool, we're not going to stop them.' "

Lemann also doesn't buy the idea that the Periscope is a glorified gossip column with less exacting standards of proof. "Periscope is a good venue for some shred of information that doesn't support a whole cover story," he said, noting that some items in the feature are contributed by Newsweek's strongest investigative reporters.

If there is disagreement about the extent of Newsweek's culpability -- and whether the Bush administration has the moral standing to criticize the magazine -- the experts agreed that Newsweek needs to be more careful in the future.

Ari L. Goldman, a Columbia Journalism School professor and former New York Times reporter who specializes in religion, believes that Newsweek and other publications need to be more familiar with Islam -- not because Muslims are hypersensitive about their faith but because they have the same reverence for it that Christians and Jews have for their religion.

But sensitivity, Goldman said, doesn't mean declining to publish an accurate story. "If al-Qaida were flushing the Bible down the toilet, I think we'd want to know," Goldman said.

When it comes to verifying such stories in the future, Lemann suggested that Newsweek borrow a page from the New Yorker and institute a rigorous fact-checking system -- even if it means that an editor, and not just the reporter, knows the identity of a confidential source.

"This sort of thing doesn't happen much these days at the New Yorker, and that is largely because the fact checking is so careful. What you want in this situation is that when a reporter comes in and says, 'I got this from an anonymous source,' you say, 'OK, I want to talk to your source, or I want a fact-checker to talk to your source.' "