WaPo Dons Sackcloth and Ashes
An amazing admission from the Washington Post today that their coverage of the lead-up to the Iraq War was terribly flawed.
“We did our job but we didn’t do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder,” assistant managing editor Bob Woodward says in the story. “We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier” than many believed.
Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks told Kurtz, “There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?”
Executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. said, “We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration’s rationale.”
In his more-than-3,000-word story, Kurtz writes, “The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.”