Victory: ABC News Backtracks & Apologizes

Yesterday, I took ABC News to task for essentially helping create a justification for journalists to ignore the war in Iraq (see the key posts here and here). It was an abomination for any major news media to make such a statement, much less a publication that is designed to create/perpetuate conventional wisdom among beltway journalists. Many of you responded to this with emails, calls and blog posts of protest. And today, we see the results of that criticism, as ABC News has now formally apologized. From ABC News's The Note today:

"Yesterday, we wrote about how the war in Iraq does not dominate America's media the way it might. As can happen with The Note, we didn't explain ourselves well enough. What we meant simply was that the story does not get covered in certain media quarters commensurate with its importance."

I have no idea if this is genuine or just a face-saving reaction to hard-hitting criticism. But it shows that with enough tenacity from bloggers, media critics, and groups like the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, even the beltway media can be pressured to do its job and be objective (check out another good example of this today at MyDD). I for one think this is a victory, however small. Let's hope it means they are serious about providing America with the real story of what is going on in Iraq.