As with all other slimy spineless predators, when cornered journalists often attempt to escape in a cloud of ink. The Post this morning featured no fewer than four "yes, it was bad, but..." stories about the Newsweek retraction, one of which was on the front page:

• Yes, it was bad, but what sort of savage kills people over a book??? Which is all well and good, and pointed out here by T and elsewhere by many others. Then again, one of big media's oft-crowed advantages over the blogosphere is their "boots-on-the-ground" resource of on-site journalists. You would think that, with such vaunted knowledge, they would have perhaps known in advance something like this was possible. But be responsible for the consequences? Hey, weren't you listening? They're savages.
• Yes, it was bad, but since congress is weighing in, it's really just politics-as-usual. It's not a story about media irresponsibility and poorly hidden agendas screwing up a complex war effort and getting innocents killed. No sir.
• Yes, it was bad, but isn't the Newsweek editor really a great guy? I mean, this guy's a Journalist. He stands for Truth, Justice, and the Little Guy! He shouldn't be tarred and feathered for allowing an unsubstantiated rumor to be published as fact. Don't you people understand what Journalists do???

  Oh... wait...

• Yes, it was bad, but boy doesn't the White House have a lot of nerve criticising us about anonymous sources?!? Easily the best of the lot, since it proves conclusively that the White House press corps really has succumbed to a twisted form of Stockholm Syndrome. How else do we explain their inability to distinguish between a politician and a journalist? That they have suddenly discovered anonymous sources are bad, after having benefitted from their use for years, if not decades, deserves no further comment. Hypocracy is, after all, something they find in other people.

Newsweek lied, people died may in fact be a bit of satire, but it's no worse than what traipses across the editorial pages of print journalism's bastions every week. And unlike last year's television news debacles, to date no one has paid a price for this particular print debacle.

Except perhaps for slightly more than a dozen people in Afghanistan.