NRO Apologizes

National Review has apologized for an “editing failure” involving a blogger in Lebanon and says it can no longer stand by a disputed dispatch from W. Thomas Smith Jr. The former Marine resigned Friday, saying he “should have been more specific in terms of my sourcing.”

The magazine’s Web editor, Kathryn Jean Lopez, wrote that after Smith reported that 5,000 Hezbollah gunmen had massed in a Christian part of Beirut, “two of our independent sources agreed with Smith’s critics that the event was unlikely, and one — an editor who lives and works in Beirut — flatly stated that it didn’t happen.”