On April 14, The Baltimore Sun published an article on Page A3. Its conclusion:

[Negroponte's deputy Michael] Hayden tried to counter the criticism that the Iraq war has diverted resources from possible threats such as Iran, saying he couldn't recall "being forced to make a trade-off." The officials said that although Iran announced this week that it had produced 164 centrifuges to enrich uranium, it would take years to produce the 54,000 centrifuges needed to build a nuclear weapon.

"The assessment of the timeline was broad enough that the recent events, particularly until they're well understood ... won't be affected," said Kenneth Brill, head of the new National Counterproliferation Center. Iran could be exaggerating its accomplishments, as it has in the past, he said. Asked whether there had been any disagreement among U.S. analysts about Iran's nuclear timeline, [analyst Thomas] Fingar said there had not.

Alert readers of Winds of Change will immediately recognize that the bolded clause is downright false, and very misleading. But most newspaper readers would not. Trusting this reporting and editing would lead them to conclude that, yeah, a nuclear-armed Iran might possibly be a threat--but if it is, government intelligence officials are confident that it is a distant one.

That evening, I wrote to the reporter, copying the <i Sun's managing editor and public editor:

Today's story "Officials confident about data on Iran" is troubling for the picture it paints of high-ranking Americans who think they have a good grasp of the state of the Iranian nuclear program. Among other lessons, the past few years of the Iraqi experience should have taught these officers that modesty about the limits of their knowledge is rarely misplaced.

Well, the press' job is to report such official foolishness, not correct it, so fair enough.

Unfortunately, the fourth-to-last paragraph of your article is a misstatement of fact that will be very misleading to readers trying to understand the progress of Iran's Manhattan Project for themselves. Here's your paragraph:

"The officials said that although Iran announced this week that it had produced 164 centrifuges to enrich uranium, it would take years to produce the 54,000 centrifuges needed to build a nuclear weapon."

The naive reader would calculate that Iran has 0.3% of the needed number of centrifuges to enrich enough uranium for one weapon.

Here's one recent story on the subject. Quoting, [Asst. US Sect'y of State] Rademaker said the technology to enrich uranium to a low level could also be used to make weapons-grade uranium, saying that it would take a little over 13 years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon with the 164 centrifuges currently in use...Iran has informed the IAEA that it plans to construct 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz next year, Rademaker said. "We calculate that a 3,000-machine cascade could produce enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon within 271 days," he said.

Even these presumably-correct calculations make two assumptions.

1. The starting feedstock is unenriched uranium, i.e. Iran does not have hundreds of kilograms of reactor-grade material already. Material that might (or might not) have been obtained from Pakistan, North Korea, China, or Russia.
2. There are no relevant undeclared Iranian programs. IAEA director el-Baradei stated this week that he thinks that Iran does have secret programs. Western officials have said much the same thing. [AMac note: like the Green Salt Project, unreported by The Sun.]

In short, an intelligent but uninformed reader will actually have a worse understanding of the state of the Iranian nuclear program after reading your article. I hope that, at a minimum, The Sun will correct the glaring factual error I outlined above.

I heard back from the reporter: I'm convinced this was an honest mistake on a complex topic. But, more than a week later--not one word from the editors or ombudsman, to this email or others. Including one asking specifically about how The Sun's handling of this factual error squares with their stated policy, that "The Sun is committed to providing fair and accurate coverage."

And no correction.

This might not matter except on principle: but for the support that the tainted article lends to The Sun's own editorial position on Iran, Don't Go There. First line--"Leave it to a diplomat to offer the most candid assessment so far of the idea that the United States would attack Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions: 'completely nuts.'" Echoed two days after the article by Fariborz Fatemi's letter, Open real dialogue with Iran's leaders.

It's one thing to urge putting all our marbles in good-faith negotiations with a country that is, say, 0.3% of the way to building a bomb--with US Intelligence Officials confident that that is the case.

Quite another thing to steer that course in the world as it actually is: a world that is being hidden from the view of the readers of this newspaper.

Posts on the misbehavior of mainstream media institutions sometimes prompt commenters to suppose that this is the result of some dark conspiracy. Aside from being both unlikely and unprovable, this explanation is unnecessary. Jeff Jarvis has blogged about how coverage suffers when a diversity of viewpoints is absent from the newsroom. Hugh Hewitt and others opine regularly about how mistakes such as this one stem from absence of "genuine intellectual diversity" from many newsrooms and studios.

That--and the self-regard that comes from being the only best paper in town--is what causes the national and international coverage of The Sun to suffer. This is not the first time that ideological blinders have hampered The Sun's reporting on a politically-charged topic, and it will hardly be the last. Cori Dauber has commented knowledgably about the NYT and Washington Post. Patterico has occasionally had things to say about The Los Angeles Times. Second-tier papers deserve brickbats (and praise) as well. In one form or another, the mainstream media will be around for a long time to come. The more honest and nimble they become--and the more willing they become to correct their missteps--the better for all of us.