Just Give the Press One More Chance to Get This Right

Remember last summer, when various media outlets looked back over their coverage of the run-up to the war in Iraq and admitted they'd not done such a good job of covering events as they unfolded, that perhaps they should have been more skeptical, perhaps applied some basic analytic skills to the facts at hand. At the time these admissions that they'd missed the story were coming out, I wasn't convinced (and I was hardly alone in this) they amounted to much,

"There's nothing I see in the lame mea culpas coming out of the press for the last few months, or from the various investigations into pre-war decision making and intelligence gathering that leads me in any way to believe anybody would behave any differently faced with a similar set of circumstances."

Now the press has a chance, a chance that's been percolating in front of it for about 7 weeks now, to redeem itself. They have a story they could sink their teeth into, with high level intrigue and deception. Of course, following this story would open up old wounds, exposing again just how inept the press was back 2002. So how are they handling this? Are they redeeming themselves for their earlier failures, or are they compounding them? What do you think?