I'm close to giving up on The Washington Post, which has become quite a different newspaper from what it was in the days of Woodward and Bernstein…and I don't mean that it was usually Liberal back then. I mean that it was usually correct. The current editors have a pro-Bush slant, which is of course their right. I read a lot of news that comes out of that viewpoint. But like Fox News, they occasionally get so enthusiastic that it impacts the accuracy of their reporting. On May 3, they ran a story that…well, here. I'll quote the first paragraph…
Democrats Back Down On Iraq Timetable
Compromise Bill in Works After Veto Override FailsBy Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 3, 2007; Page A01President Bush and congressional leaders began negotiating a second war funding bill yesterday, with Democrats offering the first major concession: an agreement to drop their demand for a timeline to bring troops home from Iraq.
Note that this was a Page One report and it's pretty explicit. Congressional leaders, it says, are negotiating with Bush and have withdrawn their insistence on a timeline to end the war. Today, they issued the following correction and it is now — in smaller type — the preface to the online version of the article…
A May 3 Page One article about negotiations between President Bush and congressional Democrats over a war spending bill said the Democrats offered the first major concession by dropping their demand that the bill it include a deadline to bring troops home from Iraq. While Democrats are no longer pushing a firm date for troop withdrawals, party leaders did not specifically make that concession during a Wednesday meeting with Bush at the White House.
Translation: We said they offered it but they really didn't offer it. So the entire premise of our headline story was at best misleading and at worst, completely false.