Thursday, September 18

Right on, Joe.


Suddenly the president, the vice president and sundry other administration officials are publicly "correcting" certain aspects of the propaganda campaign that drove the United States into war with Iraq. Yet anyone who reads the Washington Post -- which means most of the people in and around the United States government and the national press corps -- should have strongly suspected that false premises underpinned the war. To find the Post's path-breaking stories, however, most of which were reported by Walter Pincus, readers had to thumb their way back to Page A20 or deeper.

The Post editors buried nearly all of the scoops by Pincus (and his colleagues Dana Priest, Dana Milbank, Barton Gellman and Karen DeYoung) until after the president declared victory. Why did a leading newspaper (often wrongly described as "liberal") behave so timorously?