Out looking for WMDs

Times Forgets to Check Voicemail

New York Observer: On Sunday, April 9, the New York Times reported on page A1 that the Vice President's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby had been authorized to leak to former Times reporter Judith Miller that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" to produce a nuclear bomb.

The Times piece said that Libby was told to overstate the intelligence.

But on Wednesday, Libby filed a correction to accompany his original court filings (from which the Times had gotten its information). The correction explained that he was not told to oversell the intelligence. Details of the letter were made available to the media on Tuesday night, and The Washington Post ran a piece on Wednesday explaining Libby's correction.

The Times, however, did not publish the new Libby filing until today, because, as an Editor's Note points out in today's Times, a voicemail and an email with the information "went unnoticed."

[Times correction, from the Times: Although Mr. Fitzgerald formally filed his corrective yesterday, accounts of it were provided to some news organizations on Tuesday night, and were the basis for news articles yesterday. The Times did not publish one, as other organizations did, because a telephone message and an e-mail message about the court filing went unnoticed at the newspaper. An article on the filing appears today, on Page A17.]

On the one hand, it's refreshing that the Times in its corrections section has always explained exactly what the mistake was, and why. Unlike most papers, which just say we made a mistake, here's what we should have said.

On the other hand, makes you wish all the other things that systematically go unnoticed at the Times could be so easily corrected.

Photo of camera setup in the Times' D.C. bureau from Declan McCullagh Photography.