Remember when Jessica Lynch testified before Congress five years ago and implied that the Pentagon, desperate for an Iraq war hero in 2003, fed the news media a story that she shot it out with Saddam's troops before they captured her?
“They chose to lie and tried to make me a legend,” Lynch testified.
Her view of the poorly reported and poorly edited story that The Washington Post published April 3, 2003, was the result of The Washington Post's failure to correct the story promptly, its failure to identify the "one official" it quoted, and the failure of the press as a whole to expose The Washington Post's total responsibility for the lie of a "legend" it created.
The Post cover-up. The lie wasn't that Lynch was a hero. Of course, she was, simply for being there, risking her life to defeat Iraq's totalitarian Baathists. The lie was in reporting the fictitious March 23, 2003, gunfight so prominently, refusing to correct the error clearly, and letting President Bush and the Pentagon take the blame, with sinister motives attached, for issuing the false story.
Well, now we're hearing The Washington Post has sunk even deeper to cover up its chronic dishonesty. A few weeks ago, according to W. Joseph Campbell who has been following the scandal, it erased the story and the story's headline from its website. The Post gave no explanation.
The Post's ombudsman Patrick Pexton said he was checking out why the story disappeared. Yeah, I'll bet he's checking hard.
Frank
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