I don’t know if this is the new Jeff Bezos Washington Post or if this is still the old management Washington Post, but they issued an interesting apology today.
Today, on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” the Washington Post admitted they got it wrong – they covered the demonstration, but didn’t actually headline the speech.
It was 50 years ago today
I forgive them for that. The fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a speech on that day was not really news. He was the scheduled speaker. The huge numbers of people there was newsworthy, and there were plenty of photos of big crowds. The fact that the demonstrations were peaceful probably sold fewer newspapers than if they had turned violent, but peaceful they were and the Post reported it correctly.
There was no way to predict, at the time, that the speech would be the thing that people remembered from that day. Since they are a newspaper and not a future prediction service, they’ve got nothing to apologize for – in this case.
They do owe everybody – both in the U.S. and Iraq and around the world – a big type, boldfaced apology for co-operating with the Bush administration to feed the public a steady stream of lies in the run-up to the Iraq War. That was not a question of failing to understand what would be important in the future, which everybody can be forgiven. That was about not asking the right questions, that was about believing people they shouldn’t have believed, that was about totally failing to meet their job description, that was dereliction of their duty as journalists, that was complicity in murder and war crimes, that was inexcusable.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for an apology.
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