Wise Words ... in Washington.

WaPo's ombudsman hears from a reader:

“Why has the Post let Fox News lead on the issue of the murder of our Libyan ambassador and other Americans? For the Post to survive it needs to swallow its tendency to look the other way when it comes to Obama and not surrender what we rely on it for — expertise in foreign and military journalism. That it took so long to ‘discover’ that the murders were calculated, and that warnings were ignored, is an embarrassment for the Post. Never sacrifice your credibility; it’s all you have.”

The ombudsman explains:

The Post’s coverage of the Libya attack was good early and good late, but there was an unfortunate gap in the middle — partly but not completely explained by personnel issues — that made it look like The Post was shying away from a full-court press to find out what the Obama administration knew and whether it was giving a true portrayal of the attack.
...
[I]n subsequent days it seemed that The Post almost went silent on the background to the Libya attack and concentrated instead on the increasing and widespread protests around the Muslim world triggered by a made-in-America video clip ridiculing the prophet Muhammad.
Now, this was a real story. U.S. diplomats were threatened in more than 20 countries by violent demonstrations for the next two weeks, and frankly these countries are far larger and more important to U.S. interests than is Libya.

But four Americans, including the ambassador, died in Benghazi, and readers were getting angrier by the day that The Post was not delving into why they died. Reporting on the Libya attack was either buried in the overall protest stories or put on pages deep inside the A section. And it was thin.
...
All during this period, CNN, Fox News and other media outlets in Washington were hammering away at whether the Obama administration was being honest about what it knew and whether the murders were a planned terrorist attack. The Post published some of this in its Sept. 13 story but did not develop it further.

Miller finally returned to the story on Sept. 28, 17 days after the attack, with a front-page story based on accounts from intelligence sources and public remarks by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta indicating that it was a planned terrorist attack with possible participation by al-Qaeda affiliates. Since then, The Post has been on it almost every day.
...
The Post needs to keep digging. That gap in the middle enraged many readers and reinforced their false suspicions that The Post is trying to cover for Obama, and it can’t let that happen.

~Patrick B. Pexton