Why I Don't Bother Half The Time

Asking for corrections, that is.

The Post, like most news organizations, would sooner remove dental coverage from the company health plan than admit it made a significant mistake. Trivial errors get their due in the Corrections box--today we learn the Post was wrong to say Tiger Woods won the Western Open in July, and that Karyn Langhorne book-signing is actually at the Barnes & Noble in Bowie Town Center.

But if you ask the paper to correct major factual misrepresentations, relax, take up a hobby, and just let it go, babe. Your chances of getting a correction are slim, are likely to be acknowledged long after the initial mistake, and the paper may revert to printing the error all over again after a decent interval has passed. So today I'm not going to bother pinging the Post over Bush Says Iraq Pullout Would Be 'A Disaster' by Michael Fletcher and Glenn Kessler, who write:

And although Vice President Cheney repeatedly implied that an Iraqi intelligence agent met with a Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker five months before the attacks long after the story had been discredited, Bush said that "nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September 11 were ordered by Iraq."

That's a reference to a Czech intelligence report that 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi official in Prague. The 9/11 Commission concluded the meeting didn't take place, but that hardly settles the issue, nor does it inspire confidence that the commission never interviewed the witness who claims he saw it.

Journalism professor and columnist Terry Mattingly has experienced the Post's correction culture, having noted on July 18 that back in April, the Post's Karl Vick mistakenly claimed Christians sacked a Muslim Constantinople in the 13th Century. Um, no, that particular misadventure consisted of Western Christians of the 4th Crusade sacking what was then a Byzantine Christian city. Details here at Get Religion. Mattingly finally got a response from the foreign desk. The Post won't print a correction because it eventually ran a Letter to the Editor. In the immortal and very nearly literate words of the Post:

This letter, titled “This Battle Wasn’t Over Islam,” addresses the very same complaints that you have discussed with me and acts similar to a correction...

Of course one way in which it doesn't "act similar to a correction" is that the letter isn't attached to the top of the story, online. Even that's no prize, however, if any of you remember the episode involving Patrice Cuddy, falsely described by Petula Dvoark as a "novice protester" at an antiwar demonstration last year. The original online correction mistakenly included an editor's internal note:

A Sept. 23 Metro article about people coming to Washington for the Sept. 24 demonstration against the war in Iraq described ^ (don't want to say "incorrectly" in this case) Patrice Cuddy, 56, of Olathe, Kan., as a novice protester. Cuddy had participated in three other large rallies against the war, two in Washington and one in New York.

The bolded section was eventually removed. But remember: Even when Posties run a major correction, it doesn't mean they think they're wrong.

Along the same lines, I'm still waiting for a formal response from ombudsman Deborah Howell to my July 14 request for corrections to at least three stories by Howard Kurtz and other reporters who falsely stated that Joe Wilson found that claims about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger were unsupported. I pursue this only out of principle.  A correction may or may not be run, but that doesn't guarantee that any of those reporters will accept it even though their own Susan Schmidt debunked the notion long ago in her report on the famed Senate Select Intelligence Committee report. Back in 2005, Kurtz eventually and quietly acknowledged that report when he stated although his [Wilson's] credibility did take a hit from a critical Senate intelligence committee report. A one-time hit, apparently.

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