The NYT's publisher says his paper didn't do a good enough job of correcting reports that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had WMDs, but Arthur Sulzberger Jr. also refused to point a finger at beleaguered reporter Judith Miller, who wrote many of them.

I will address what I see as some major spinning in that statement.

But first, an excerpt from the AP story on Yahoo! News:

"It was an institutional failure," he said. "We didn't own up to it quickly enough." ...

Sulzberger (speaking to the Online News Association) also addressed Miller's statement, in a first-person article about the case, that she had once agreed to identify Libby as a "former Hill staffer" because he had worked on Capitol Hill. The description never made its way into a story but the agreement has been described as deceptive by many journalists.

Although confidential sources are key to thorough coverage of Washington, he said, the Times is reviewing its practices.

"We can't ever be lying to our readers" about sources' identities, Sulzberger said. "And I think we have a responsibility to our readers to be clear as to why they're talking to us. What's their stake in it?"

When asked by a member of the audience whether he thought the Times' credibility had been hurt by what the questioner termed its failure to fire Miller, he responded, "No, I don't."

Now, allow me to correct the spin on the WMD issue.

Howell Raines, the NYT's executive editor and a man handpicked for the position by Sulzberger, wanted to raise the "competitive metabolism" of the newsroom. This made flashy scoops even more important, but there were other factors at play on the Iraq story.

In the book Hard News, by Seth Mnookin (from pages 242-243):

... Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs, something he was especially intent on conveying after the beating the paper took for both its Augusta reporting and its flawed coverage of Kissinger's position on the invasion of Iraq.

"My sense was that Howell Raines was eager to have articles that supported the warmongering out of Washington," former investigative editor Doug Frantz wrote in an e-mail to me.

Frantz, who personally edited some of Miller's stories, went on to write, "He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of al Qaeda. Because of that, Judy Miller's reporting was encouraged by other senior editors at the newspaper, sometimes over the objections of other editors."

Frantz was the person Miller self-identified herself to as "Little Miss Run Amok." When he asked her what it meant, she replied, "It means I can do whatever I want to."

Not only that, Mnookin claimed Raines chased out Stephen Engelberg, the paper's investigative editor prior to Frantz and someone who had co-written a book with Miller on biological weapons. He had the knowledge to rein her in:

With Engelberg gone, Raines implicitly and explicitly instructed his staff to get her stories into the paper.

Many of the most problematic WMD stories had Miller's byline on them.

Here's an excerpt from former public editor Daniel Okrent's May 30, 2004 commentary on the WMD issue ("Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Destraction?"):

Some of The Times's coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines; and several fine articles by David Johnston, James Risen and others that provided perspective or challenged information in the faulty stories were played as quietly as a lullaby. Especially notable among these was Risen's "C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports," which was completed several days before the invasion and unaccountably held for a week. It didn't appear until three days after the war's start, and even then was interred on Page B10.

By the way, the NYT ran an editor's note on May 26, 2004 called The Times and Iraq (which ran on page A10). Okrent agreed with most of it and supported the conclusion the problem was institutional in nature.

That being said, read it and tell me where you see any acknowledgement by the paper of the problems stemming from deliberate decisions made to push the WMD issue by people at the very highest levels of the Times' newsroom.

The Times is trying to sweep an awful lot of WMD dust under the "institutional failures" rug.

Note:

Jack Shafer reviewed Hard News for Slate. Here's an excerpt:

Even if Raines had held on after the Augusta, Blair, and Bragg stink bombs, critics still would have forced him to square the difference between his paper's prewar coverage of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction with the facts uncovered on the ground. These shortcomings truly matter and can be laid directly at Raines' doorstep. He wasn't the first Times executive editor to indulge petulant WMD reporter Judith Miller, but he's the only one to have given her a license to ill. When the Times finally acknowledged the deficiencies of its WMD reporting in a May 2004 note from the editors, it published a Web page that sampled some of its problematic stories: Of the 28 listed, at least nine had a Miller byline or co-byline. Luckily for Raines, he was long gone by the time of the WMD reckoning, and this allowed the paper to paint the failure as institutional instead of personal.