Paul Moore, the Public Editor of the Baltimore Sun, has a column on that paper’s coverage of the Downing Street Memo:
Last Sunday, the newspaper published an Associated Press article based on material from additional Downing Street documents, which further detailed British officials’ doubts about the basis for the war and noted their concerns about postwar instability in Iraq.
Best decided the AP story was solid enough for placement inside the newspaper (it ran on Page 10A), but she did not consider it for the front page because of the amount of anonymous sourcing used.
Some editors are seeking articles that can present the 2002 memos in a broader context that makes sense to readers. The memos do suggest that the United States manipulated facts to fit its policy, but that interpretation hinges on the one intelligence officer’s words, the actual meaning of which is open to debate.
Additional reporting is required to provide readers with background needed to weigh questions raised by the Downing Street documents. This will not be an easy task.
“Finding the right balance of how – and how much – to cover the memos is greatly complicated by the politics surrounding it,” Best said.
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Reaction on the flip:
First, Moore is totally out of line in his characerization of Sir Richard Dearlove’s analysis as merely ‘one intelligence officer’s words’. Dearlove was the head of MI6. He had just met with George Tenet and Condi Rice. He was not engaged in speculation, like any number of his underlings might have been willing to undertake. He was a giving a first hand account of what he had learned about American intentions. He said war was inevitable, that we had no plan for the aftermath, and that the intelligence was being fixed around the policy.
It is the authority of Dearlove’s account that separates the minutes from ‘old-news’. By calling him ‘one intelligence officer’, Moore dramatically diminishes the significance of the leak. I don’t recall one American newspaper saying we fixed the intelligence before this memo was released. I recall a serious of investigations and reports that concluded that the intelligence had been wrong, that we had no good sources, that we made faulty assumptions. Where is the reporting on the fact that the intelligence was not wrong, but fixed?
Then we have the editor, Kathleen Best. She is clearly intimidated by the recent attacks on anonymous sources. She was willing to print an Associated Press story in her paper, but because it contained anonymous sources she buried it on page A10. She could solve this problem by putting some of her own reporters on the case so that she could feel confident in the sources. All she can say is that they have ‘failed so far’ to find an opportunity to ‘get a substantive story on the front page’. Sorry, that’s not good enough.
And she explains the real reason that she is failing in her job:
What politics? You mean angry emails from wingnuts that don’t have an interest in the truth?
Or do you mean something far more sinister? Which is it, Ms. Best? Do your fucking job.
