The case against me was laid out by Media Matters, which complained that in last Sunday's column I had taken note that a handful of readers had faulted the paper for not following up on the Times's disclosure, but that I didn't give an opinion about that criticism, as I usually do with most other issues raised in the ombudsman's column. That's a fair observation. The main reason I didn't express a view was that, at the time of my writing on May 5, I didn't know much about the London Times report other than what the six or seven readers who had e-mailed me said at the time.
The Post had reported essentially nothing. There was a glancing mention of the leaked memo in the Style section by columnist Tina Brown on May 5 and a one-sentence reference inside a news story on May 6 about Blair's election victory.
So what I chose to do was to give readers at least some idea what they were missing by including what seemed to be the most important quotes from the secret memo, but without further comment, in part because it was not clear to me yet if the memo was authentic or if there was something about its substance that wasn't apparent. When I asked editors at the time why there had been no coverage, I was told that "it was a story that, in the best of all worlds, would have been in the paper, but we were tied up with election coverage."
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