What is it in our culture that makes it so easy to forgive (at least some) people for being wrong, and so hard to forgive people for being right?

Leonard Downie Jr. (in foreground, with his predecessor, Ben Bradlee, at left) was nudged into retirement as executive editor of the Washington Post last summer with the arrival of new publisher Katharine Weymouth. Might it have helped if he'd been forced out several years earlier for the paper's breakdown in covering the run-up to the Iraq war?

by Ken

Howie and Noah and I have all been talking a lot lately about this maddening issue of accountability. Most recently it has come up in connection with the crimes of the Bush regimistas, including the war crimes of the Bush regimistas, which we are required by a host of international treaties to prosecute, even if we find it inconvenient to do so. Hard as it may be to believe, there really isn't an "inconvenience exemption" from our obligation to prosecute, for example, torture.

The argument we keep coming back to is that failure to punish the kind of law-breaking and Constitution-shredding in which the Bush regime not only regularly but systematically engaged pretty well guarantees that all the excesses will be repeated and in all likelihood expanded. Bet on it.

It's not as if nobody has noticed or written about this before. On the great issues of our time, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the housing bubble that on top of all the other chicanery and bogosity brought the economy to its knees, there were plenty of people who got the stories right in real time while the talking heads of industry and the media got them wrong, and the record shows that, overwhelmingly, the people who got the stories right not only weren't rewarded but were punished while the people who got the stories wrong not only weren't punished but were rewarded.

Now Jason Linkins is reporting on HuffPost about what appears to be an especially egregious instance. The Washington Post has promoted, as one of two managing editors, the assistant managing editor for national news who not only played a major role in the Post's blown coverage of the Bush regime's push to war in Iraq, and in particular the question of Iraq's posession of WMDs, but apparently thinks they did just fine.

Jason goes back to a surprisingly tough piece done in August 2004 by the Post's Howard Kurtz, himself one of the paper's most notorious butt-kissing, status-quo-worshiping hacks, reviewing its coverage, with extensive, heavily regretful quotes from the principals involved, from then-Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. on down. Most everyone accepts at least some blame, with one shining exception.

Liz Spayd, the assistant managing editor for national news, says The Post's overall record was strong.

"I believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone to question the administration's assertions on all kinds of subjects related to the war. . . . Do I wish we would have had more and pushed harder and deeper into questions of whether they possessed weapons of mass destruction? Absolutely," she said. "Do I feel we owe our readers an apology? I don't think so." [Note: The ellipsis is in Kurtz's published story.]

Jason points to published pieces in 2004 and 2005 by the Post's then-ombudsman, Michael Getler, which suggest that a lot of readers disagreed about whether they were owed an apology, and the ombudsman sympathized.

Spayd is also implicated in what Jason calls "the curious case of Walter Pincus." To most of us, Pincus is one of the legendary reporters of the last 30-40 years. And he's not one of the people who got the run-up to the Iraq war wrong. He was clearly a pain in Post editors' butt. As a long-time expert on nuclear weapons, he had all kinds of questions about the stories the Bush regime was feeding the public, but he had a tough time getting skeptical stories into the paper at all, let alone getting prominent placement for them.

The 2004 Kurtz story contains some remarkable back-biting at Pincus, mostly anonymous, which is itself interesting when you consider the kinds of mea culpas people were putting on the record. "[S]ome in the Post newsroom were questioning his work. Editors complained that he was 'cryptic,' as one put it, and that his hard-to-follow stories had to be heavily rewritten."

Two people go on the record, more or less, about the problems with Walter Pincus:

Spayd declined to discuss Pincus's writing but said that "stories on intelligence are always difficult to edit and parse and to ensure their accuracy and get into the paper."

Downie agreed that difficulties in editing Pincus may have been a factor in the prewar period, because he is "so well sourced" that his reporting often amounts to putting together "fragments" until the pieces were, in Downie's word, "storifyable."

Now I don't doubt that editorial elves were rewriting the dickens out of Pincus's stories, but I'm not persuaded it was because they were unreadable or because it was so hard to "ensure their accuracy." After all, Downie complained (complained?) that his stories were "so well sourced." And I'm not sure I could guess what "storifyable" means.

Jason has a theory about those unnamed newsroom sources:

If I'm playing the *POOF!* NOW I AM ON THE RECORD/*ZAP!* NOW I AM OFF THE RECORD game, I have to conclude that unnamed "editors" and "some in the Post newsroom" are really either Spayd or Downie, and, given the tenor of their responses, likely Spayd.

Anyway, the news, as you have surely guessed, is that Ms. Spayd is one of those new managing editors. She and Raju Narisetti, according to the paper's press release, "will share responsibility for The Post's award-winning journalism, whether in print, online and on mobile devices, and they will lead the integration of The Post's print and online newsrooms." Specifically, Ms. Spayd "will oversee the gathering, editing and production of news. Her brief will include political, general, business, foreign and metropolitan news, as well as The Post's news desk and the print newspaper's day-to-day production."

Jason quotes extensively from the lingering concern ombudsman Getler voiced in 2005 about the paper's failure to expose the Bush regime's misrepresentations. ("I cannot think of a story in the past 40 years that offers more warning signs for journalism and for the role of the press in our democracy.") He stressed the crucial role of editors in communicating to reporters that, with "very important stories out there" ("whether war or health care or budget deficits or other subjects that affect our lives and future"), "there is a determination and commitment to get to the bottom of them in a timely fashion." In the case of Iraq, he wrote,

[I]t seemed to me that editors didn't have their eye on, and didn't go for, the right ball at the right time. It's a lesson that ought to be etched in the culture here as deeply as Watergate.

Not long ago, I cited Paul Krugman's blog-post complaint about the pending appointment of CNN's Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general, recalling his factually erroneous on-air savaging of Michael Moore's Sicko.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

Maybe we're wrong about Liz Spayd. Maybe she has actually learned the journalistic lessons that were clearly escaping her in her 2004 look back. It sure looks, though, as if "socially acceptable" wrongness has once again been rewarded.

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