corrente

Last Sunday we noted the Washington Post ran a self-critical analysis on the subject of their coverage of the Runup to War.

Today they ran a number of reader responses to their little Oopsie!. They gave it the headline "Pissed-Off Readers Respond."

Naw, not really. They called it

Reflections on The Post's Self-Evaluation

If we believe that a properly informed citizenry is integral to a functional democracy, we should either recognize the media's role in allowing the war to happen or accept that we do not have a functional democracy.

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The Post's failure was not its inability to counter specific administration claims. Rather, it was its unwillingness to pull back and challenge the broader strategic, and philosophical, bases that made a war with Iraq a certainty for the Bush-Cheney administration.

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Perhaps Mr. Downie and others have been rereading those Watergate clips too often. I don't expect newspaper reporters to alter events, just to do the job they have constitutional protection to do.

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So the stories skeptical of weapons of mass destruction were "incremental, difficult-to-read stories." Howard Kurtz's report on The Post's prewar coverage repeatedly cited the difficulty of editing such stories.

Who said editing a newspaper was supposed to be easy?

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I was astonished to read a quotation of The Post's executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., saying that "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones."

On Feb. 15, 2003, I was one of several million people worldwide protesting the imminent invasion of Iraq. We were hundreds of thousands strong in New York City alone. While I experienced many powerful emotions that day, I can assure Mr. Downie that "loneliness" was not among them.

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Howard Kurtz's story left me frustrated and angry. Although it contained a lot of breast-beating and mea culpas, it didn't answer the question: "Now what?"

I have two sons approaching draft age. The role of journalists is very much to ensure that we do not needlessly sacrifice the lives of our sons and daughters -- now and in the future.

Had the Post been willing to do that, I would feel much less worried about my sons' future.

These are just a few excerpts from a few of the letters. Go read the whole thing. It ain't just us old lefties who are just as pissed about the media as we are about the MalAdministration.