Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler’s column about the Post’s coverage of the Schiavo memo is surprisingly good.

Before I get to the meat of the column, here are two tidbits that I haven’t seen elsewhere:

- The March 19 Post article by Mike Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia that claimed the memo was circulated by Republican party leaders not only was distributed by the Post’s News Service, but also appeared in some early versions of the Post itself. This contradicts Howard Kurtz’s assertion that the “party leaders” language appeared only in “other papers” (i.e., not in the Post).

- The “advisory” released by the Post on April 1 was later issued as a “clarification,” which is closer to a correction. The advisory/clarification stated that the authorship of the memo was unknown (which was true at the time) but did not retract the allegation that “party leaders” had distributed it.

This is how Getler characterizes the critique of MSM coverage by conservative bloggers:

The critics said that there was no reason to believe the unsigned memo originated with Republicans and that there was considerable reason to suspect a Democratic dirty trick.

Unlike Jack Shafer and many of the haters who have been e-mailing me, Getler does not say that conservative bloggers uniformly asserted the memo was a fake. Nor does he claim, as Terry Neal did, that Allen’s flawed reporting has been vindicated.

Getler rightly notes that the Post should have been “quicker and more straightforward with its readers in acknowledging some confusion over this controversial story.”

Getler closes his column about what he calls the “mysterious Senate memo” with this:

The degree of distribution [of the Schiavo memo] has yet to be resolved, as does the issue of the original description in the news service and early printed edition version that it was distributed “by party leaders.”

To put it just a bit differently, nearly a month after the Allen/Roig-Franzia article was published in the Post and other newspapers, the Post still has neither substantiated nor retracted its assertion that the memo was “distributed to Republican senators by party leaders.” At this point, we know of only one Republican senator who received the memo–Mel Martinez–and he got it from an aide, not a party leader.

Update: Scott Johnson of Power Line is not happy with Getler’s column. He says Getler should have acknowledged that “if the memo had been described by the Post in a manner consistent with the known facts, it would hardly have merited a news story.”

The moonbats at Daily Kos aren’t happy either, but for completely different reasons. They insist that “Allen’s [March 19] story was RIGHT” despite the fact that Allen himself requested a retraction.

comments (0)   trackbacks (4)