Jayson Blair

WASHINGTON - I know the defining image of victory over Iraq will forever be the flight-suited president landing on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln. Nevertheless, I have been carrying around a far less telegenic postscript to the conflict. What haunts me is an offhand remark of a congressional aide in a New Yorker piece about missing weapons of mass destruction. The man said that he didn't think their absence would "sway U.S. public opinion much." After all, he said, "everyone loves to be on the winning side."

The Honorable George W. Bush President of the United States The White House Washington, D.C. Dear Mr. President: We were thrilled to read you will announce plans next week for a permanent station on the moon that ultimately would be a steppingstone for sending humans to Mars. You will be under intense pressure, we suspect, to choose key colonists for the moon station - doctors, scientists, engineers. While they are certainly important, there are so many others we believe worthy of being dispatched into the heavens.

What is a nonfiction writer's obligation to the truth? This is the question raised by the recent controversy about James Frey's acknowledgement that he "changed things," namely some of the details, in his best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Since less than 5 percent of the book has come under question, Mr. Frey found this to be "within the realm of what's appropriate for a memoir." In this interpretation, he has been supported by Oprah Winfrey, whose selection of the book for her book club in October propelled it to the top of the nonfiction lists.

BOSTON - Now before the year runs out, we once again present our media culpa column, an annual accounting of the errors of our ways. we made along the path of 2003. We - the editorial we - almost skipped this ritual cleansing of the keyboard this year. After all, our culpas are measly compared with the big culp-rit Jayson Blair, the serial plagiarist who lied his way out of a job at The New York Times and into a book contract. As for mishaps, ours pale beside the mistake of folks who put that "Mission Accomplished" banner behind the president in the May 1 flight deck photo op. Nor did we allow Pedro Martinez to continue pitching in the fateful eighth inning of the seventh game of the Red Sox-Yankees playoff series.

WASHINGTON - A right-wing radio talk-show host reminiscing about the old days in filmmaker John Sayles' new movie, Silver City, rails against Jane Fonda for a moment, then pauses to admit, "Gawd, how I miss her!" That's how I figure a lot of right-wingers feel about CBS anchor Dan Rather, now that he has admitted, after two stormy weeks, that his network could not authenticate four documents that it used to raise new questions about President Bush's Air National Guard service. A lot of Mr. Rather's critics on the right say they want him to go, but they really want him to stay.

WASHINGTON -- People say he was only hyped because of his skin color. They say he was never as good as he was made out to be; folks were just desperate to see a player of his race do well. I am not talking about Donovan McNabb and the controversy that just led Rush Limbaugh to resign from ESPN, though I will in a moment. Right now, I'm talking about Keith Van Horn of the New York Knicks. When he entered the NBA a few years ago, he was compared by some to Larry Bird, one of the last U.S.-born white guys to be considered a basketball immortal.

THE STRUGGLE of the lofty New York Times to put its house in order is a very big deal, even for those who don't read the scandal-plagued paper. Why? Because the Times so often shapes the news agenda for the network broadcasts and for hundreds of newspapers, large and small. Many of them, including The Sun, pay a fee to reprint its articles. Decisions made at the Times have a lot to do with how we see the world and evaluate the issues of the day. For example, an April 21 report that U.S. military search teams had a hot lead on the location of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction carried great weight because it broke on Page A1 of the Times, which is our country's "newspaper of record."

CHICAGO - President Bush is such an admirer of Winston Churchill that he keeps a bust of him in the Oval Office. You don't have to agree with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who likens Mr. Bush to Churchill, to see that the president has taken one of the British statesman's maxims to heart. "In wartime," Sir Winston confided, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." What is dawning on many people now is that in making the case for war, the administration and its allies did not make a fetish of strict honesty and candor.

In an attempt to put an embarrassing episode behind it, The New York Times announced yesterday the retirement of Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose involvement in the leak of a CIA officer's name led to the indictment of a high-ranking member of the Bush White House. The announcement, newspaper officials said, came after weeks of negotiations spurred by the realization that Miller's reporting techniques had been less than scrupulous. Nevertheless, the paper's publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., and its editor, Bill Keller, praised her in statements issued yesterday.

The New York Times yesterday acknowledged that serious flaws marred its reporting before the invasion of Iraq last year, saying the newspaper "fell for misinformation" from a now-discredited circle of Iraqi exiles seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. A note to readers, written by Executive Editor Bill Keller and Managing Editor Jill Abramson, stated that The Times reported that Hussein had intensified his efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction without adequately signaling the deep reservations of some experts.