Questions Over Counting and Credit

Knickmeyer wrote three stories about the death toll, reporting how different agencies were counting it. Hoyt and Walcott's memo said the latter two stories "pulled back somewhat," but Hoffman said, "This is a war, and there may always be varying estimates of the death toll. We tried in a series of stories in recent days to give readers as much as we could learn about differing estimates. It isn't like counting missile silos with a satellite in the Cold War."

Frankly, there is no way at this point that I can say anything authoritative about Knickmeyer's story or Hoyt and Walcott's complaint. I can only follow the story and see where it leads.

In reporting for an article about Iraq war coverage, I have reviewed dozens of Post stories in the past several weeks and have not found anything that struck me as awry.

The other issue in the Knight-Ridder memo involves giving credit for who has a story first. For years, news organizations rarely credited one another. If one organization's scoop could be matched by another organization, no credit was given. That has changed as the news media have become more transparent about reporting.

Hoyt and Walcott said that Knight-Ridder should have been credited in a Feb. 21 Post story by Glenn Kessler. That story reported on a State Department reorganization that sidelined career arms control experts who don't share the Bush administration's mistrust of international arms negotiations and agreements. Knight-Ridder's Warren P. Strobel had done a similar story on Feb. 7.

The memo said, "There was not a single fact in Kessler's story that was not in Strobel's, the product of weeks of careful enterprise reporting and interviews with 11 current and former government officials." Kessler said that he was already reporting on the reorganization before Strobel's story ran and that he "had already obtained many of the details listed in his story. But, in retrospect, I would have gladly cited Knight-Ridder."

When I brought this complaint to Post editors, they said that the Knight-Ridder story should have been acknowledged, but that the matter did not merit a correction. I thought a clarification on Page A2, saying that a similar story by Knight-Ridder had appeared two weeks earlier, would have been appropriate.

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I received several complaints this week that The Post did not have a story about a Supreme Court decision last week that ended a 20-year effort by the National Organization for Women to use a racketeering law against anti-abortion groups that blockaded abortion clinics in the 1980s. The 8-0 ruling against NOW was expected and was not thought to have an impact because a 1994 law protects access to clinics. Editors on the National Desk said a short story had been written and did not get into the paper because news space was tight -- and they wish now that it had not been left out.

Deborah Howell can be reached at 202-334-7582 or atombudsman@washpost.com.