Shaming Steno Sue

In today's online edition of the Washington Post, Michael Getler does a halfway decent job of shaming Sue Schmidt for her false tale of the capture and rescue of Private Jessica Lynch. At least he does up until the point where he tries to shift the blame from Schmidt and the Post to the officials whose lies Schmidt reported as fact.

First, he catches the June 17 Post "follow-up," also written by Schmidt (and others) in a lie:

The front-page segment of the June 17 Post story did refer to "initial news reports, including those in The Washington Post, which cited unnamed U.S. officials . . ." That made it appear that The Post was not alone on the initial story. But The Post story was exclusive. The rest of the world's media picked it up from The Post, which put this tale into the public domain.

Then Getler makes some points this site raised when the June 17 story was posted.

The new Post account described itself as a "more thorough but inconclusive cut at history." That is accurate. But it did not address the issues that eat away at the trust of large numbers of readers, many of whom have called or e-mailed to complain. Why did the information in that first story, which was wrong in its most compelling aspects, remain unchallenged for so long? What were the motivations (and even the identities) of the leakers and sustainers of this myth, and why didn't reporters dig deeper into it more quickly? The story had an odor to it almost from the beginning, and other news organizations blew holes in it well before The Post did, though not as authoritatively.

That odor is the Steno Sue Stench�, and we've caught a whiff of it before.

But then Getler starts to go off the track.

How do these unnamed sources explain putting out this information and not correcting it sooner? Did the government intend to manipulate the press? Was The Post itself reluctant to revisit this episode?

The issue is not the unnamed sources failing to correct the story (why would they correct their own lie?), it was about the Post publishing their lies in the first place. And suggesting that the government manipulated the press ignores the reporters' obligation not to repeat administration propaganda without confirming its accuracy.

Most embarassingly, Getler claims that the Post "blew holes" in the story, and also implicitly credits the Post for "knocking [the story] down." But if the Post hadn't told a false tale in the first place, there would be no need to blow holes in it or knock it down. If the Post had wanted to be truthful, it would have named the officials who told the lies about Lynch and published a story about how the administration used the paper to mislead the American public. (The other possibility is that the officials told an accurate story and the paper embellished it. As long as the Post hides the facts, we can't know which is true.)

The Steno Sue story is one about unaccountability. The Post won't name the officials who it claims lied to their reporters, and it won't explain why and how it published a false story in the first place. And, as far as I can tell, it hasn't held its reporters accountable for publishing a false story (it even let Schmidt write her own "correction"). Until it does all three, the Post has no credibility in reporting on the administration or the military.

Note: Written this morning but Blogger was and still is not working correctly.