Washington Post Editor Rebukes His Reporter for Television Comments on Israel
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The executive editor of the Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., has rebuked one of his Pulitzer-Prize winning reporters for suggesting on television that Israel was purposely leaving Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon “because as long as they’re being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations.”
The action came as Mayor Koch and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America pressed the Post on the issue. The reporter in question, Thomas Ricks, is the author of a new book, “Fiasco,” sharply critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq.
On the August 6 episode of CNN’s Reliable Sources, Mr. Ricks said that “one of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they’re being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.”
When CNN’s Howard Kurtz asked if Mr. Ricks was “suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of its firepower, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here,” Mr. Ricks agreed that he had heard that from “military analysts.”
“I have made clear to Tom Ricks that he should not have made those statements,” Mr. Downie wrote to Mr. Koch.
Mr. Koch compared Mr. Ricks’s statements to the “the age-old blood libel.”
Mr. Ricks told The New York Sun, “The comments were accurate: that I said I had been told this by people. I wish I hadn’t said them, and I intend from now on to keep my mouth shut about it.”
