By Deborah Howell
Sunday, March 5, 2006; B06
Washington journalism has about it a peculiar insularity. Who gets credit for groundbreaking reporting is not important to most readers, but Washington editors often try to knock down each other's stories and want to be credited when they think they've broken a story first. I know; I've done it.
So a memo from Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau that criticized The Post, leaked to a popular media news Web site Friday, was not viewed with equanimity in The Post's newsroom.
Several in the newsroom felt the attack by Clark Hoyt, Knight-Ridder Washington editor, and John Walcott, Washington bureau chief, on Post stories last week about Iraq was unwarranted. David Hoffman, assistant managing editor for foreign news, said he feels strongly that The Post's story was groundbreaking and accurate.
Newspaper staff memos are leaked all the time to Jim Romenesko, who runs a daily collection of media news on the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla. So Post staffers felt the leak was deliberate; Hoyt said he did not leak the memo. Hoyt had already voiced his complaints to me.
The most serious issue was Hoyt's questioning of figures cited in a front-page story in The Post on Tuesday -- that the death toll in recent Iraqi violence had hit 1,300 -- and of where that information came from.
In his memo, Hoyt said, "Our reporting in Baghdad -- and reporting by other news organizations -- so far has been unable to verify the Post story.
"The Post quoted officials at the city morgue in Baghdad as saying that they had logged 1,300 bodies of people killed as a result of the sectarian fighting. But when our correspondent examined the books at the morgue, he could find only about 250 bodies logged in as killed in the violence. Our story, quoting the Iraqi Cabinet, said the death toll was 379, which would have included those 250."
The memo went on to say that a Post article on Wednesday "quoted Gen. Ali Shamarri of the Interior Ministry's statistics department as saying the toll was 1,077. . . . In Baghdad, our correspondents attempted to interview Gen. Shamarri to confirm the Post's account of violence more widespread than previously believed. They were told that no person by the name of Ali Shamarri worked in the statistics department, nor anywhere else in the ministry."
The Post story on Wednesday, quoting the former U.N. human rights chief for Iraq, also said that "[o]fficials overseeing Baghdad's morgue have come under pressure not to investigate the soaring number of apparent cases of execution and torture."
Hoffman said of all the stories by Baghdad Bureau Chief Ellen Knickmeyer: "I am confident in the validity and accuracy of our story. I am confident in the soundness of our sources.
I am aware of the identity of all the sources and the process of the reporting."
Knickmeyer, a longtime foreign correspondent for the Associated Press before joining The Post, was in the morgue and reported what she saw personally, Hoffman said. Iraqi staffers for The Post were also involved in the reporting. What about Gen. Shamarri, whom no one else could find? Hoffman said he doesn't know why other reporters couldn't find Shamarri. "I can't speak for them."
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.
