This is a little embarrassing - we've all let the ball drop massively on the Downing Street Memo, which became public on May 1st and actually broke as an MSM story oh, yesterday. In Salon Eric Boehlert does a good job of tracing the non-response, and framing the memo in context with its implications, namely that by July 2002, the Bush Administration had decided to invade Iraq heedless of any U.N. processes, and were already marshalling the facts and intelligence to justify the war based on terrorism and WMD, rather than, say, the truth)(relevant paragraph from memo after the jump). Oh yes, and there was no exit strategy (which we were reminded of anew just a few weeks ago).

So. This memo was out there for almost six weeks, and it barely registered. Why? Maybe because it's not big news that there were, uh, 'factual irregularities' regarding the justification for going to war (WMD, hi) - is it news to confirm what you basically already know? Sploid thought so on May 12 ("White House Won't Answer Iraq Memo"), noting baldly:

It's been 12 days since the Times of London printed the damning U.K. memo proving that the White House intentionally invented the "need" for invading Iraq, despite knowing there was no WMD. The once-secret memo shows that Tony Blair knew all of this long before the U.N. performance by Colin Powell, and that Downing Street saw the U.S. invasion as "inevitable." The White House refuses to answer 89 members of Congress who formally demanded explanations more than a week ago. (Here Sploid links to CNN, by the way).

Even before officially taking up his post, NYT Public Editor Barney Calame was calling out the Times for their negligible Downing St. coverage: "...key editors simply were slow to recognize that the minutes of a high-powered meeting on a life-and-death issue -- their authenticity undisputed -- probably needed to be assessed in some fashion for readers."

But otherwise, the MSM was largely silent. Per Boehlert:

Until Tuesday, the number of U.S. newspaper articles reporting on the Downing Street memo could be counted on two hands, including two articles in the New York Times, two in the Washington Post (print edition), and one each in Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Chicago Tribune. Only the Chicago Tribune article ran on Page 1, and it focused on how little commotion the memo had caused in the United States, noting, "The White House has denied the premise of the memo, the American media have reacted slowly to it and the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war."

Well, the issue is out there now. It's true we've been distracted by Newsweek, Saddam's underpants and the drama of Deep Throat, but in hindsight it seems crazy that this could fall so neatly through the cracks (very Darfur-esque, no?). Six weeks later, it's too early to tell if it will stick. Too bad we can't say the same about the war.

UPDATE: The CJR addressed this back on May 20th with an interesting observation: "Sometimes news outlets given to echoing each other can echo silence instead of noise. This is the story of one such silence -- one now interrupted by the distant rumble of unhappy readers questioning the silence itself." Let's see how this one echoes...

Bush lied about war? Nope, no news there!
Why did it take more than a month for the U.S. press to report on the serious revelations in the Downing Street memo? [Salon]
The Memo Comes In From the Cold [WaPo]
Barney Calame: Where's the Downing Street coverage? [NYT Public Editor's Forum]
After Downing Street [AfterDowningStreet.org]

The damning paragraph from the Downing Street Memo based on the impressions of "C" aka Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service:

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the U.N. route ... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."