Speaking of the Post...
In his weekly column, Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler reported without comment that readers had criticized the newspaper for ignoring a leaked British memo on the Iraq war published in the British Sunday Times.
Getler's failure to offer a judgment about the Post's editorial decision is remarkable, not only because he regularly responds in his column to reader criticisms, but because of the explosive content of the memo. The memo indicates that Britain's intelligence minister reported after a trip to the United States that President Bush had decided to go to war in Iraq in the summer of 2002, and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around" the decision that had already been made. In contrast to the U.S. media, U.K. news outlets devoted considerable coverage to the memo, and its disclosure reportedly had a significant impact on the Labour Party's loss of seats in the House of Commons.
Yet Getler simply reported that he had received reader complaints and moved on.
The Post referenced the memo only twice prior to Getler's column: in the May 5 edition of Tina Brown's syndicated column -- which appeared in the paper's Style section -- and in a May 6 article recapping Blair's re-election.
By the end of the week, readers had criticized the Post for this glaring lack of coverage. Perhaps Getler decided that because the Post's coverage was in line with much of the U.S. media, which largely ignored the memo, the Post's failure did not merit his comment. Here's Getler's minimalist treatment:
A handful of readers last week also faulted the paper for not following up on a London Sunday Times disclosure of a secret memo by a foreign policy aide to British Prime Minister Tony Blair after a Bush-Blair meeting in July 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq. It said, in part: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam [Hussein], through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Getler's handling of this issue contrasts with his usual approach. He typically notes readers' objections and then provides his own brief evaluation of the merits of their criticisms. In the same May 8 column, Getler mentioned three other instances in which readers took issue with the Post's reporting during the previous week. In each case, he commented on the merits...
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