Who Can You Trust?

More from guest blogger Big Brother:

First this: I was going to write about the New York Times' Editorial Note from yesterday apologizing for its bad coverage about WMD's leading up to the debacle in Iraq, so let me get it out of the way. I was going to write a letter to the editor asking the Times to fire Judith Miller, whose articles, though unattributed in the Note, were most often sited. Judy Miller raised my alarm bells most recently in her coverage of Richard Clarke, in which she seemed, under the circumstances, to be awfully easy on Bush. I was able to use her coverage as an example to my mother of how the Times has balanced reporting (that is, to my mother's thinking), but that is hardly a ringing endorsement of Miller's journalism. But mainly, I was going to tell the editor that I can't really trust the Times as I have before. I am transferring my allegiance to the Washington Post. Here's why. The Post has online forums with its journalists and in those forums I am given a sense of how the journalist works and how reporting decisions are made. Yesterday, Dana Priest was online, and she had this to say in response a question about the timing of the latest terrorist threats: "I'm very suspicious, especially of the 'election threat' -- so we didn't write this story for a while, in order to ask a wider range of people and certainly enough non-political types to feel certain we were not being spun." This isn't the first time I've read such a thing on the Post's online forums, and I find this inside look at how the journalist works along with the editorial staff much more reassuring than the Times' mea culpa. I will continue to read the Times, of course (it's my hometown paper after all), but with less confidence. Ah, me. Maybe I ought to write that damn letter to the editor, after all.