Phoenix Woman (and be sure to update your blogroll with the new address) asks some questions. Here are a few:

Q. Why, on the eve of war, did the Washington Post’s executive editor reject a story by Walter Pincus, its experienced and knowledgeable national security reporter, that questioned administration claims of hidden Iraqi weapons and why, when the editor reconsidered, the story ran on Page 17?
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Q. Why did the Post, to the “dismay” of the paper’s ombudsman, bury in the back pages or miss stories that challenged the administration’s version of events? Or, as Pincus complained, why did Post editors go “through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference” while, from August 2002 to the start of the war in March 2003, did the Post, according to its press critic, Howard Kurtz, publish “more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq”?
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Q. Why did Michael Massing’s critique of Iraq-war coverage, in the New York Review of Books, conclude that “The Post was not alone. The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions. The occasional critical stories that did appear were…tucked well out of sight.”
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Q. Why did the New York Times and others parrot administration claims about Iraq’s acquisition of aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons when independent experts were readily available to debunk the claims?
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Q. Why did the Times’s Thomas E. Friedman and other foreign affairs specialists, who should have known better, join the “let’s-go-to-war” chorus?
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Q. Why was a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace accusing the administration of misusing intelligence by misrepresenting and distorting it given two paragraphs in the Times and 700 words in the Post (but deep inside), with neither story citing the report’s reference to distorted and misrepresented intelligence?

I think I know the answers. But I have one of my own to add: Can the mainstream press be fixed?

Recently, I had a conversation, almost an argument, with one of my best friends, one of only three Republican voting friends in my life. The point of contention was her assertion that "Chris Matthews is a liberal." I almost choked on my popcorn. But she's not a big blog reader, and as a wealthy person, she tends to read publications like FT and the WSJ, and she considers her occasional review of magazines like Newsweek and Time to "balance" the right-leaning perspective found in the financial dailies. She's a busy mom, so she doesn't spend that much time in front of TV news shows, but when she does she sticks to the majors- CNN, MSNBC. She's bright enough to generally avoid FOX, but her husband watches them. She told me that I've officially gone "off the deep end" since becoming a blogger, and that my perspective is strange and foreign to her, in matters of politics and society.

It's hard to know where to begin with such people. Attacking the press seems (to her) the petty act of a jealous blogger envious of bigger audiences the mainstream press enjoys. I admit that I do wish more people would drop subscriptions to cable stations and publications that are as fact-free as much of the WaPo and NYT have become. But I suppose this isn't going to happen, and that there are good reasons why the more widely read bloggers spend so much time pointing out what is obvious to blog readers, namely that Joke Line is a lying whore and Judy Miller needs industrial strength kneepads. But I wonder- is it enough? Is it working? Are we changing the press?

What do you think? Is there a way, short of burning their HQs to the ground and stringing up editors, of helping the press return to its essential function in a free democracy? We're on the way to another war of choice, in large part because our "leaders" fear the power of the press. For that reason alone, the question becomes one of more than conversational importance.