The Nation on the WaPo’s Editors
Here’s a really interesting look at the way coverage of the Bush administration’s lies and misstatements on Iraq in the Washington Post changed over the last six months. From The Nation’s Ari Berman: The Postwar Post.
It isn’t so much that the stories themselves changed; it’s that the placement of those stories in the paper changed. At first they were being buried way back. It was only as time went on and the truth about administration deceptions became more obvious that the paper started running the material on the front page.
Note that this makes pretty much no difference to people like me, who tend to read their newspapers online, where any story you can link to is pretty much just as prominent as any other. But in the real world I guess it matters a lot.
Anyway, like I said, it’s interesting. I especially liked this quotation from the end:
The newfound intensity of the press brings to mind, Pincus says, something Gene McCarthy told him years ago. “The press is a bunch of blackbirds,” McCarthy mused. “All are on a wire and one will go to another wire and when that bird doesn’t get electrocuted, all the birds will go to that other wire.”
