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Ex Post Facto

It's quite disappointing that, as Jim Fallows notes, no one involved in writing or editing The Washington Post's lead editorial Saturday--which argued that, rather than Barack Obama, Iranian martyr Neda Agha-Soltan ought to have received the Nobel Peace Prize--seems to have been aware, or made any effort to become aware, of the facts that a) the Nobel is not given posthumously; and b) the deadline for nominations is in February, long before the world had heard Neda's name. 

But it's simply unprofessional that, despite these factual oversights having been publicized in a range of venues--including the paper's own comments section--the editorial is still online three days later, without any correction or clarification appended. Andrew Sullivan, by contrast, had also recommended Neda for the award on his blog, but corrected his error promptly Monday morning.

I'm not generally one for MSM-bashing, but episodes such as this (and Anne Applebaum's fact-challenged defenses of Roman Polanski, and George Will's willful climate-change misrepresentations) do an awful lot to undercut large media outlets' arguments that their rigorous standards of fact-checking and accountability set them apart from online commentary.