BAD NEWS AND GOOD NEWS FOR THE GUARDIAN:

First, the bad news: It’s retracted and apologized for a story that cast doubts on whether Jack Straw and Colin Powell believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And now, the story — widely debunked in the Blogosphere — that Wolfowitz said the war was all about oil has vanished from its website, though no retraction has appeared so far. Presumably one will be forthcoming, as the story was pretty obviously bogus.

The good news: Now The Guardian can call itself the New York Times of Britain! They were just Dowdifying, you see. . . .

UPDATE: Here’s more, from The Scotsman:

ALONE in a national newspaper industry congenitally reluctant to correct its mistakes, the Guardian has an exemplary record: its famous “corrections and clarifications” column has even been turned into a book.

All the more mysterious, therefore, that it has yet to correct or clarify its Saturday page-one splash which alleged that Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, met in New York’s Waldorf Hotel just before a crucial UN session on Iraq on 5 February and moaned to each other about the poor quality of their intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Some sort of clarification, at the very least, is surely in order because no evidence has yet been produced to show that the alleged meeting between Mr Powell and Mr Straw ever took place, much less that they said what the Guardian alleges. . . .

The story’s provenance is not helped by the joint byline: Richard Norton-Taylor is an experienced correspondent on intelligence matters, but his name comes after Dan Plesch, who is not even a journalist but a “defence expert” who was opposed to the Iraq war and whose commentaries at the start of hostilities have not stood the test of time.

Indeed. The correction has been made, but the mystery remains.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Guardian will reportedly print a full correction of the story tomorrow.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Tech Addict observes:

It seems to me that lately, so many journalists are running around trying to make every quote from an administration official into an indictment of the Bush Administration. It’s happened twice this week, both to statements made by Paul Wolfowitz. The first time it happened, it was Vanity Fair. I was even sucked in by the reports made on CBS Radio news that said that he’d admitted they’d manufactured an acceptable reason to go into Iraq. I thought it sounded just awful. Then I read the transcript which showed that Vanity Fair had clipped the quote to make it condemning.

Now it’s a story in the Guardian that’s causing hullaballoo all over the blogosphere. It seems that in their hurry to condemn the Bush Administration for something, anything, they’re manufacturing evidence, which, if memory serves, is just what they’re accusing the Bush administration of doing.

Well put. Sometimes, in a feeding frenzy, the sharks get bitten too. Sometimes they even get so excited that they bite themselves. Something similar seems to be going on here.

Meanwhile Roger Simon wonders if these attacks on Wolfowitz are because he’s Jewish, making him “a natural target for the upper class hit men of the so-called British Left, who for many decades have often had a certain, shall we say, disdain for my co-religionists.”