First, allow me to start off with the final question I will write on the GOP “talking points memo” for Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz’ weekly on-line Q&A at noon ET today(you can submit your own here):

Post ombudsman Michael Getler acknowledged in his Sunday column that 60,000 Post readers did indeed receive newspapers that contained the erroneous March 20 story stating that Republican leaders wrote the “talking points memo” that we now know was written by a legal aide for a first-term senator. You have repeatedly told the public otherwise. So now, how about a correction?

I doubt we’ll ever see anything regarding a correcting of the record. As media critic, Kurtz is conveniently and irresponsibly focusing on the one thing that reporter Mike Allen got right — the memo’s authenticity — and is ignoring his and the Post’s reign of error regarding the memo’s distribution, authorship and relevance. From his column today:

When controversy erupted last month over what ABC’s Douglass and The Post’s Mike Allen described as a strategy memo given to Republican senators in the Terri Schiavo case, some conservative bloggers denounced the document as questionable, even fake. Not all backed off after GOP Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida admitted an aide had written the talking points.

Ironically, his column focuses on how nasty and personal critics and bloggers can be. I’ll admit, I’ve been less than civil at times — in big, bold letters here, I called Howard Kurtz a tool. I don’t support hate e-mails, cursing or similar “criticisms,” but I’m crying a river for Mr. Kurtz. Maybe if he’d drop the arrogance and admit, just once, that the Post’s coverage of the memo has left a lot to be desired, people wouldn’t have to stoop so low to get his attention. He still has no idea why he and others come across as arrogant.

The memo issue has been one heck of a roller-coaster ride, but as they say, the more you run over a dead cat, the flatter it gets.

I can sum up the Washington Post’s handling of this issue with a picture that speaks a thousand words:

The picture is of Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a completely fabricated story. You can read about her at the Museum of Hoaxes, where I acquired the photo.

You’d think the Post would have learned a thing or two about relating to the public. History repeats itself.

It took Washington Post reporters almost three weeks to prove what they first alleged March 19 through an anonymous source — the memo was in fact generated by a GOP office, namely a legal aide for freshman Sen. Mel Martinez (R - Fla.). My bad for saying that the memo was fake — I immediately corrected the record.

The Post, however, has yet to correct or retract its erroneous reporting that Republican leadership wrote the memo, or that it was distributed to its 55 senators. As of today, one idiot aide wrote it, his apparently idiot boss got a hold of it and idiotically passed it off to a Democratic senator. In short, uberblogger Mickey Kaus put it best when he called the Post’s coverage “non-fake but inaccurate.”

For the record, I took away three valuable nuggets of knowledge from the whole mess:

1) It does not behoove me to jump to conclusions.
2) It is hilariously funny and deliciously ironic to watch a mainstream media that commits numerous errors on a daily basis, frets over its lack of credibility and pleads with the public not to rush to judgment, to rush to judgment and state that the blogosphere has no credibility because of one error.
3) Writing a letter to the Post, its reporters or its ombudsman is as futile an exercise as talking to a brick wall.

So on that note, I e-mailed ombudsman Michael Getler and told him that I’m hanging up my spurs:

Dear Mr. Getler:

This is the last time I will be bugging you about the GOP “talking points memo” that was extensively covered in the Washington Post.

After all, what good is it to write (politely, I might add) to reporters, editors and ombudsmen who do not respond? I’ll be briefly touching on that later, but let’s visit the pertinent facts.

Yes, it turned out that the memo concerning Terri Schiavo was in fact legitimate in that it came from a GOP senator’s office. Score one for the Post. But Mike Allen’s story of April 7 is quite the opposite of what he and Manuel Roig-Franzia first reported.

The headline and subsequent stories painted a picture of a memo being handed out to most, if not all, GOP senators to dictate policy on Schiavo’s plight. The version that ran in the Post stated that the memo was “distributed only to Republican senators,” plural. The original version sent to the world through the Post’s wire service — and was distributed to 60,000 of your subscribers, according to your Sunday column — incorrectly concluded that Republican leaders wrote the memo. Two such stories from Reuters could be found for weeks on your Web site.

Subsequent stories, columns and Q&As continually repeated the theme that the memo was mass-distributed. I have chronicled all of these errors on my blog, and you can find a master list here. Up until today, media writer Howard Kurtz will not address any error and blindly sticks by the memo’s authenticity as if it vindicates everything that Allen has reported up to this point.

But the Post’s errors are only half of the story — what of this story’s relevance to begin with?

An aide to freshman Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) wrote the memo, and Martinez, through ignorance, stupidity, or both, passed it to a Democratic senator. The memo is real, but it’s hardly the big deal that your reporters made it out to be, and as I said on my blog, it’s about as worthy of front-page placement as my mother’s recipe for banana nut bread.

The Post has yet to address any reporting mistakes regarding this story. But I’ve decided that it isn’t important anymore. Please feel free to delete the letters I wrote on April 1 and April 7 questioning how the Post reached the conclusions it did, if you have not already done so. You see, I had an epiphany regarding the Post’s coverage of the memo.

Rathergate.com has received more than 6 million hits since first opening in September. My purpose as a journalist/blogger is to shame the national mainstream press into accountability by doing two things:

1) Exposing how many journalists and mainstream media agencies these days are unworthy custodians of the public trust and the First Amendment.

2) Exposing how many journalists and mainstream media agencies could care less about addressing these issues, much less the aforementioned public they claim to serve.

In short, I’d have egg on my face if the Post actually responded to e-mails in a prompt fashion and ran a few small corrections nestled inside the paper. The Post could have stood by the memo’s authenticity, yet acknowledged that no proof exists to this day that the memo was a policy tool distributed to Republican senators.

But fortunately for me, the Post stonewalled. So yes, the Post’s actions and coverage were frustrating at first, until I realized that I had yet another textbook example of media arrogance and error for my readers.

So on that note, I will bother you no more on this issue, and I hope that your absence from the Post was not due to illness or other unfortunate life experience. But to summarize my opinion of this whole mess, allow me to say that the spirit of Janet Cooke still haunts your hallowed halls.

And speaking as a media bias blogger, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Sincerely,
Kevin P. Craver
Rathergate.com

So, as Pontius Pilate would say, I wash my hands of the “talking points memo.” This blog corrected the record for them on the permament marker of the Internet. And it’s only a matter of time before reporter Mike Allen, Kurtz or another Post reporter screws the pooch big time and gives me more material with which to work.

You folks got to see the true face of a national mainstream media operation. I hope you all learned something. I sure did.

I’m Kevin P. Craver, and I approved this message.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin, who also seems sick and tired of dealing with the brick wall called Post accountability, is similarly unimpressed with Kurtz’ most recent effort, or lack thereof.