Washington Post and Iraq

But first, regarding James McGreevey -- if you haven't caught the media spin on this one, the MSNBC 'breaking news' email update pretty much sums it up:

"New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey says he is gay, resigns position"

That's right, nothing about an affair or anything. He resigned simply because he is gay.

It's so good to know that not only do we have a liberal media, but one that is extra-liberal when it comes to social issues.

It's extra egregious because in McGreevey's press conference, he made it extra clear that he is resigning because of an affair and scandals, not because he is homosexual.

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Howard Kurtz's front-page Post article on Thursday explored, finally, the issue of whether the Post had failed in its coverage in the run up to the Iraq war. The article was titled "The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story". Subheadlined "Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn't Make Front Page". Most of the article was a decent look at how stories that questioned the Administration's line were held from the front page, or killed altogether. Unfortunately, there isn't really much new information here (the Post ombudsman had done a piece on the issue back in June; same problem). Kurtz talked to people inside the newspaper -- writers and editors who were involved -- and that was helpful. But there were no huge new discoveries. All the critiques were ones that folks outside the Post have been saying for more than a year.

Final word in the article is given to the paper's executive editor, who says "People who were opposed to the war from the beginning and have been critical of the media's coverage in the period before the war have this belief that somehow the media should have crusaded against the war" ... "They have the mistaken impression that somehow if the media's coverage had been different, there wouldn't have been a war."

No, dude. You just don't get it, and that's sad. All we asked for was some basic journalistic skepticism -- asking basic questions, rather than simply taking the administration's word -- and we hardly got any in the Post, or anywhere else for that matter. When we did get it (as both Kurtz and the ombudsman concluded), it was most often burried deep in the paper.

It seems to me that while some of the working journalists are coming to terms with happened, the elite media bosses are digging themselves in deeper and deeper.

After his own people explained what happened, Downie still isn't willing to admit that he was wrong. That attitude is destructive to journalism.