War and Piece:

March 04, 2008

Now the National Review's Lisa Shiffren is expressing gape jawed astonishment at the Post Outlook Allen piece:

Whoa. I just read the Charlotte Allen piece in the Washington Post Outlook section ... I want to believe that the Post got as much dissident mail on that one as it deserved.

At some point, when is Downie going to wipe the egg off the Post's face and stop hiding behind his door and apologize?

When are some Posties going to leak "We have no idea what happened" notes to Romenesko?

Why the weird collective silence from the Post?

Does nobody care? Or are they trying to figure out what to do?

How about running an apology on its own pages? You know, sooner than later, after 10,000 other people have already reacted to the piece.

It's not that hard to do. I hear they have a lot of good writers over there.

(Although Jay Rosen explains why they might be finding it hard: "When the mistake involves the peculiar style of misguided contrarianism I've talked about here, fixing it becomes a complicated dance with the newsroom's self-image as a fighter for truth beyond faction.")