By: E&P Staff In a memo to New York Times staffers, Executive Editor Bill Keller and Managing Editor Jill Abramson declare that today's editors' note critiquing the paper's coverage of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is "not an attempt to find a scapegoat or to blame reporters for not knowing then what we know now." It said the Times was hardly alone in its false statements, and predicted that the note "will not satisfy our most vociferous critics, but it is not written for them."
The memo was posted at the Romenesko site at www.poynter.org. The text reads:
"In Wednesday's paper you'll find a note from the editors -- us -- about our coverage of Iraq and its WMD. After a thorough review of that coverage, we feel we owe our readers some explanations. The purpose of the note is to acknowledge that we, like many of our competitors and many officials in Washington, were misled on a number of stories by Iraqi informants dealing in misinformation. This note is not an attempt to find a scapegoat or to blame reporters for not knowing then what we know now. Nor is it intended to signal that you should pull your punches. Quite the contrary. As you have probably noticed in, for example, our coverage of the prisoner abuse story, we prize hard-won, hard-hitting stories.
"The note we are publishing will not satisfy our most vociferous critics, but it is not written for them. It is an attempt to set the record straight, something we do as a point of journalistic pride.
"For those of you who are wondering about the next chapter of this ordeal, the next chapter is, we keep reporting."
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