Sunday, March 24, 2013

Killing an Iraq story in the Washington Post

"The Washington Post killed my assigned piece for its Outlook section this weekend which mainly covered media failures re: Iraq and the current refusal to come to grips with that (the subject of my latest book)--yet they ran this misleading, cherry-picking, piece by Paul Farhi claiming the media "didn't fail."  I love the line about the Post in March 2003 carrying some skeptical pieces just days before the war started: "Perhaps it was too late by then. But this doesn’t sound like failure."

Here's my rejected piece.  I see that the Post is now defending killing the article because it didn't offer sufficient "broader analytical points or insights."  I'll let you consider if that's true and why they might have rejected it. "