On May 26 the New York Times finally hitched up its pants, took a deep breath and issued an editorial declaration of moderate regret for its role in boosting the case for war on Iraq. There was a bit of dutiful trumpet-tootling at the start ("we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of.... accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time...."), and then a manly confession that perhaps, maybe, conceivably, the Times's reporting was a shade less than perfect.

"We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged." Given that the paper printed tens of thousands of words of willful balderdash from 2001 to 2003, the admission leaves something to be desired, but that's scarcely surprising.

Remember this one? "Passages of some articles also posed a problem of tone. In place of a tone of journalistic detachment from our sources, we occasionally used language that adopted the sense of alarm that was contained in official reports." That was the Times issuing an exceptionally graceless admission in 2000 that it might have done better in the Wen Ho Lee affair. The collapse of the government's case against the Los Alamos scientist was one of the greatest humiliations of a national newspaper in the history of journalism. One had to go back to the publication by the London Times of the 1887 Pigott forgery libeling Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist hero, to find an equivalent debacle.

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