The Post is a Stooge

Dear Washington Post Ombudsman,

In Howard Kurtz's column today, we see Post National Editor Michael Abramowitz scrambling to apologize for printing, unchallenged, a claim by an anonymous Administration official that a state of emergency was not declared in Louisiana until after September 3. Since Gov. Blanco declared just such a state on Friday, August 26 - more than a week before the Post story - this was a shockingly false claim to appear in the Posts' pages.

The story's co-writer, Spencer Hsu, attempts to explain away this deception by saying:

We don't blow sources, period, especially if we don't have reason to believe the source in this case actually lied deliberately.

Two questions about this quote:

1. Is it true that Mr. Hsu would protect his dissembling source, even if he did believe that his source had "lied deliberately" to make a stooge of the Post? Is this official Washington Post policy?
2. If Mr. Hsu does not believe that his source "lied deliberately", then exactly how does he think the source came to state this falsehood? Since the claim itself is so egregiously wrong, there was obviously a very deliberate lie planted by someone somewhere along the line - either by the source itself or by a trusted informant of the source. In other words, someone upstream from the Washington Post lied deliberately either about: (a) The date when a state of emergency was declared in Louisiana; or (b) The source's state of knowledge regarding when, exactly, a state of emergency had been declared in Louisiana. Does Mr. Hsu mean to claim that the second case is more forgivable than the first? Is this, also, official Washington Post policy?

Thank you very much for your time.

Derek Fox