There appears to be some confusion about who made the decision to tell the public about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident. Yesterday, Katharine Armstrong, the vice president’s host in Texas, told me that she did not coordinate with the vice president’s office before calling the Corpus Christi Caller-Times Sunday morning to break the news. After my article was posted, Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride called to say that Cheney and Katharine Armstrong did indeed discuss telling the public about the incident. “The vice president was on the Armstrong ranch, and they were talking directly,” McBride told me. “The vice president and Ms. Armstrong agreed that the media should be notified, and Mrs. Armstrong called her local paper.”

That was the explanation that White House spokesman Scott McClellan put forward at the briefing yesterday. But this morning’s Washington Post says Katharine Armstrong told the paper that she and her family made the decision to tell the public about the shooting. “It was my family’s own volition, and the vice president agreed,” Armstrong told the Post. “We felt — my family felt and we conferred as a family — that the information needed to go public. It was our idea.”

This morning I talked again with Lea Anne McBride. She said that the vice president stayed at the Armstrong ranch on Saturday night, and that on Sunday he talked with Katharine Armstrong about how to make the incident public. “There was agreement,” McBride said. “They both believed that the media should be contacted and the appropriate course of action that they agreed upon was that the local media should be contacted.” McBride did not further characterize the conversation, although it seems clear that whoever brought up the idea of calling the local paper, the vice president agreed.