KEVIN DRUM wonders why so much newspaper ink has been devoted to covering a magazine's retraction of a few words in a short article that's two weeks old; and so little to a certain British memo leaked to the press after the UK election that revealed Pres. Bush's plans for Iraq 3 years ago.

The Newsweek retraction story is on Page 1 of the New York Times, Page 1 of the LA Times, and Page 3 of the Washington Post. That's pretty strong coverage for a story about a newsmagazine retracting a small error in a short piece from two weeks ago.

And how did these same news organs respond three weeks ago to a leaked British memo making it clear that President Bush had already committed himself to war with Iraq by the summer of 2002 and was actively "fixing" intelligence and facts to support that decision? It eventually ran on Page 3 in the LA Times, Page 18 in the Post, and nowhere at all in the New York Times aside from a buried Page 9 piece that treated it as strictly a British election issue.

Obviously, the answer is that the U.S. media is not as out of control as the White House would have us believe. Quite the contrary: The U.S. media is very well controlled, indeed.