John Walcott, Washington bureau chief of Knight Ridder Newspapers, co-authored a substantial story about the memo on May 6, although some of the chain's papers, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, did not run it.
"We thought it was newsworthy that the British government interpreted their meetings with members of the administration this way and took from it that an attack on Iraq was virtually inevitable," Walcott said. While some in the press "obviously felt this was old news," he said, the question remains "whether the information provided to the American public at the time was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."
The Los Angeles Times published a story on the memo May 12, citing "growing indignation among critics of the Bush White House." The Washington Post ran one on May 13, and the Chicago Tribune gave the controversy front-page play four days later.
Marjorie Miller, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, said she is "a little mystified" at the criticism of the press over the Downing Street memo and a related one written before the Blair meeting.
"I find the memos historically interesting in filling in some of the connective tissue between what was public and what was being discussed privately," she said. "But they still remain Britain's view of the U.S. It's not a smoking gun or anything. And for that reason, I don't think we underplayed it." Miller noted that her newspaper and others were reporting in 2002 "that there was a real likelihood that we would go to war."
Glenn Frankel, The Post's London bureau chief, said he could not initially confirm the memo's authenticity and "didn't really see that there was anything new in it." He said that the paper "should have taken note of it in some form" but that he viewed it as a campaign story and concluded that "its impact here was very limited." Unlike in the United States, Frankel said, "the blogosphere has yet to penetrate the discourse" in official London.
Post ombudsman Michael Getler, saying he was deluged with e-mail prompted by such liberal groups as FAIR and Media Matters for America, wrote that he was "amazed that The Post took almost two weeks to follow up" on the London Times report.
The White House press corps seemed uninterested in the memo for weeks, asking spokesman Scott McClellan only two questions about it out of about 940 queries, according to Salon magazine. That changed on June 7, when Blair visited the White House and Steve Holland of Reuters asked Bush about the memo at a news conference.
USA Today did not mention the memo before the Blair visit. Jim Cox, senior assignment editor for foreign news, told his paper that the staff could not obtain the memo or confirm its authenticity, and was concerned about the "timing" of the leak four days before the British elections.
Some newspaper editors said they were stymied by the Associated Press's lack of coverage of the memo. Deborah Seward, AP's international editor, said in a statement, "There is no question AP dropped the ball in not picking up on the Downing Street memo sooner."
The network newscasts ignored the memo until the Blair visit, and cable news channels carried only occasional reports or discussions. George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) about the memo May 15 on ABC's "This Week," and Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, raised it with Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman on "Meet the Press" Sunday.
"This was an issue that was widely debated in the presidential campaign of 2004, whether the intelligence was fixed or embellished," Russert said. "But this was new information to me." Asked about the slow response by NBC and other news outlets, he said, "One thing I've learned is when you see something from the British press, you have to vet it."
Jeffrey Dvorkin, National Public Radio's ombudsman, said the story "went under the radar of a lot of media organizations. This seemed like confirmation of what is already known in the United States, but it's still an extraordinary memo."
When he asked NPR executives why they didn't do more, Dvorkin said, "there was a kind of silence."
