There have been some curious goings on with a Barton Gellman piece published in the Washington Post yesterday. First, the page A1 article on the “Scooter” Libby indictment got some essential facts about the indictment wrong. Second, the Post — as most newspapers do — edited and revised the Web version of the piece after its initial publication. Nothing unusual there, but in this case, the revisions left us with an article with markedly different conclusions than the original.
We discovered this thanks to some nice, heads-up work by Ryan Lizza at the New Republic‘s new blog “The Plank.”
Late Saturday night, Lizza pointed to a Sunday Washington Post story that read in part, “On June 12, The Post published a story challenging the uranium claims. Wilson has since said he was among the sources for that story. A man identified by colleagues as John Hannah, described in the indictment as Libby’s “then principal deputy,” asked Libby soon afterward whether “information about Wilson’s trip could be shared with the press.” Libby replied, the indictment states, “that there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing that information publicly.”
This didn’t jibe with what Lizza had heard on Friday from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s spokesman. Lizza quickly wrote on “The Plank” that “I believe this is incorrect. On Friday, Fitzgerald’s spokesman told me and several other reporters that the principal deputy described in the indictment is Eric Edelman. And according to this biography, Edelman was indeed Libby’s deputy in June 2003, the time of the incident described above.”
His recollection turned out to be correct. On Sunday morning, Lizza received a call from Fitzgerald’s spokesman, Randall Samborn, where he told Lizza that “You’re correct, it’s Edelman. I can’t account for why the other papers are saying it’s Hannah, but it’s not. It is Eric Edelman. You heard me correctly on Friday when I said that.”
In other Gellman-related news, Josh Marshall found that a key part of the Post story was changed online after the story was initially published. We’re not going to reprint all the changes here, but the thrust of it is that the Post removed a provocative reference to Vice President Cheney’s possible role in forming a policy of outing Valerie Plame to the media. The key sentence that was cut out of the piece after its initial publication is: “On July 12, the day Cheney and Libby flew together from Norfolk, the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson’s credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source.” In its sanitized form, the pieces makes no mention of Cheney even speaking to Libby about this, or any other, matter.
This brings up an interesting question. While the updated piece replaces the original on the paper’s Web site, the initial story remains intact in Nexus and in the paper’s print edition, creating a strange existential quandary: What is the paper’s true take on the story, and which is the correct version of events? We want to say that the newest version is closer to the truth, because reporters and editors have had the luxury of going back to revise and improve their work — but then does that mean the original piece was wrong? The Post doesn’t say. But more importantly, we would like to know the reasons behind the Post‘s decision to change the story to such a large degree. In the end, it was only a few words that were deleted or changed, but they were some of the most accusatory of the whole article. Sounds like a job for the paper’s new ombudsman to tackle, and we’re calling on her to do so.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.