WASHINGTON — For many liberals frustrated with the media's coverage of President Bush, it has become a rallying cry: What about the Downing Street Memo?

Their anger, amplified by left-wing advocacy groups, columnists, bloggers and some Democrats in Congress, gradually has forced the mainstream media to take a second look at the July 2002 document. In recounting a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his aides, the memo said intelligence on Iraq "was being fixed" by the Bush administration and that war was inevitable.

Since the existence of the memo, written by a British foreign-policy adviser, was reported May 1 by London's Sunday Times, U.S. journalists have offered various explanations for why they were slow to respond.

They said that the memo was old, that the U.S. mobilization for war was widely reported at the time, that there was an initial distrust of a British press report. Some maintained the memo didn't prove anything.

But Peter Hart of the liberal group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which sent several "action alerts" urging members to contact news organizations, said, "Any story that reminds readers that the political and journalistic establishments spectacularly failed on Iraq is a difficult story for the media to report." Now, he said, in conjunction with groups such as MoveOn.org, "activists have pushed this into the media, much to the chagrin of reporters, who have no love for getting e-mails constantly telling them to do the story."

Conservatives for 15 years have used talk radio, right-leaning news operations, editorial pages and, more recently, blogs to pressure mainstream journalists into covering stories that otherwise might be ignored — from allegations about President Clinton's personal life to CBS' questionable documents on President Bush's National Guard service to the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks on Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in last year's presidential campaign. The left now can claim a similar success.

Bob Fesmire said his wife, Gina, a Silicon Valley Web designer, and two others she met on the liberal blog Daily Kos put together the site DowningStreetMemo.com, which uses the slogan "Awaken the Mainstream Media!" Boosted by a mention last month in Paul Krugman's New York Times column, the site has logged close to 500,000 visits.

After other liberal commentators accused the media of "cowardice," as the Nation Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel put it, for neglecting the Downing Street Memo, some Democrats became more vocal in their criticism. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said it was "shocking when you see how easily they fold" under pressure from the White House and urged journalists to get some "spine." Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who conducted a forum on the memo yesterday, began writing about it on Arianna Huffington's new blog.

The memo, which summarized a July 23, 2002, meeting of Blair with top security advisers, reports on a U.S. visit by Richard Dearlove, then head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service. Critics note that the memo offered no specifics about any cooking of the intelligence books or who exactly Dearlove met with in Washington, and that it could have been drawn from ongoing news accounts about the administration gearing up for war.

In February 2002, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported that "serious planning is under way within the Bush administration for a campaign against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein" that could include military action. In August 2002, The Washington Post reported that "an increasingly contentious debate is under way within the Bush administration over how to topple Saddam, with the civilian leadership pushing for innovative solutions using smaller numbers of troops and military planners repeatedly responding with more cautious approaches that would employ far larger forces."

But the long, bitter debate that followed the invasion created a climate in which the memo would be seized upon by critics of the administration.

On May 2, the day after the story hit Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times, The New York Times dealt with the memo in a dispatch from London on the final days of Blair's re-election campaign, beginning in the 10th paragraph.

Asked why the paper did not follow up for weeks, Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman told The New York Times' public editor, or ombudsman: "Given what has been reported about war planning in Washington, the revelations about the Downing Street meeting did not seem like a bolt from the blue."

John Walcott, Washington bureau chief of Knight Ridder Newspapers, co-authored a substantial story about the memo May 6. The article was published by The Seattle Times, but some Knight Ridder newspapers, such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, did not run it.

"We thought it was newsworthy that the British government interpreted their meetings with members of the administration this way and took from it that an attack on Iraq was virtually inevitable," Walcott said. The question remains "whether the information provided to the American public at the time was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post published their first stories acknowledging the existence of the memo on May 12 and May 13, respectively. Four days later, the Chicago Tribune gave front-page play to the building debate over the memo's significance. The Seattle Times also published the Tribune account.

Marjorie Miller, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, said she is "a little mystified" at the criticism of the media over the Downing Street Memo and an earlier British document, reported by The Post last Sunday and also printed in The Seattle Times, that concluded the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for a postwar occupation of Iraq.

"I find the memos historically interesting in filling in some of the connective tissue between what was public and what was being discussed privately," she said. "But they still remain Britain's view of the U.S. It's not a smoking gun or anything. And for that reason, I don't think we underplayed it." Miller noted that her newspaper and others were reporting in 2002 "that there was a real likelihood that we would go to war."

Glenn Frankel, The Post's London bureau chief, said he initially could not confirm the memo's authenticity and "didn't really see that there was anything new in it." He said that the newspaper "should have taken note of it in some form" but that he viewed it as a campaign story and concluded that "its impact here was very limited."

The White House press corps seemed uninterested in the memo for weeks, asking spokesman Scott McClellan only two questions about it out of about 940 queries, according to Salon magazine. That changed June 7, when Blair visited the White House and Steve Holland of Reuters asked Bush about the memo.

USA Today did not mention the memo before the Blair visit. Jim Cox, senior assignment editor for foreign news, told his paper that the staff could not obtain the memo or confirm its authenticity, and was concerned about the "timing" of the leak four days before the British elections.

Some newspaper editors said they were stymied by The Associated Press's lack of coverage of the memo. Deborah Seward, AP's international editor, said in a statement, "There is no question AP dropped the ball in not picking up on the Downing Street Memo sooner."

Network newscasts ignored the memo until the Blair visit, and cable-news channels carried occasional reports or discussions. George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., about the memo May 15 on ABC's "This Week," and Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, raised it with Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman on "Meet the Press" on June 4.

"This was an issue that was widely debated in the presidential campaign of 2004, whether the intelligence was fixed or embellished," Russert said.

"But this was new information to me." Asked about the slow response by NBC and other news outlets, he said, "One thing I've learned is when you see something from the British press, you have to vet it."

Jeffrey Dvorkin, National Public Radio's ombudsman, said the story "went under the radar of a lot of media organizations. This seemed like confirmation of what is already known in the United States, but it's still an extraordinary memo."

When he asked NPR executives why they didn't do more, Dvorkin said, "there was a kind of silence."

Background from Seattle Times archives is included in this report.

More about the memo

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607_1,00.html