Media Matters: While Editors Nationwide Call for Increased Scrutiny of Downing Street Memo, Biggest Editorial Pages Remain Silent
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Summary
WASHINGTON, June 15 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Since the publication of the Downing Street Memo, a secret British intelligence memo suggesting that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to support its case for war in Iraq, the editorial pages of four of the five largest U.S. newspapers -- USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times -- have remained conspicuously silent about the controversy surrounding the document, Media Matters for America said today.
But a Media Matters for America survey of U.S. newspaper coverage from May 1 to June 15 shows that of the 20 editorial pages across the country that addressed the memo, from large-circulation papers such as The Dallas Morning News to smaller papers such as the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette, 18 emphasized the importance of the document, many calling for further investigation into the explosive questions it raises. The dissenters were editorials in The Denver Post and The Washington Post, both of which claimed that the memo merely reinforces what was already known from other sources and argued that U.S. attention is best focused on how to win the war in Iraq.See the full content of this document
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Media Matters: While Editors Nationwide Call for Increased Scrutiny of Downing Street Memo, Biggest Editorial Pages Remain Silent
Further, of 12 editorial page editors nationwide who addressed the memo in op-eds, eight asserted the importance of the memo and four took the position that it contains nothing significant or new, though three of those were nonetheless critical of the Bush administration, in some cases, harshly so. In addition, five of the six reader representatives or ombudsmen who addressed coverage of the memo argued the story warrants more...
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