Timesologist Gabriel Sherman has a good catch from over the weekend.
In a Times book review of Bob Woodward’s The War Within, New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson admits that she “failed” to push hard enough for the publication of a major WMD-claim doubting piece by James Risen in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. At that time, Abramson was the paper’s Washington bureau chief.
Sherman rounds out his post with some interesting quotes from Abramson:
Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.Abramson told me this morning that she felt it was neccessary to discuss the Times’s reporting in her Woodward review. ‘”I just thought it would be disingenuous [not to], since basically I was dealing with more or less the same subject,” she said. Abramson told me that she couldn’t recall why Risen’s skeptical piece didn’t make it immediately into the paper. “I can’t recall if it sat in the Washington queue, or the foreign queue, or what,” she said. But whatever the reason, she called the episode “egregious.” …
Abramson added that since her time as Washington bureau chief, she has thought a lot about the paper’s pre-war coverage and what could have been done differently. “In real time, I failed to grasp its importance and urgency,” she said of Risen’s article.
