Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz and ombudsman Deborah Howell finally got around to addressing the incident two weeks ago in which Post military analyst William Arkin referred to U.S. troops as “mercenaries”. I guess we’ll have to wait until next week for their response to last Friday’s botched report on former undersecretary of defense Doug Feith.

UPDATE: Kurtz is livechatting with readers right now, so the Post’s report on Feith might come up. Arkin already has.

UPDATE II: Here’s Kurtz’s take:

Falls Church, Va.: What do you think about The Post’s correction this weekend regarding Doug Feith? Does this suck the air out of that story? How does a mistake like that (attributing quotations from Report A incorrectly to Report B) get made? Is it safe to assume that the reporter has not seen the actual report but is relying upon someone else’s characterization of what it contains?
washingtonpost.com: Official’s Key Report On Iraq Is Faulted (Post, Feb. 9)
Howard Kurtz: It was a serious and sloppy mistake. I don’t know precisely how it happened, but the article says that The Post obtained an unclassified summary of the IG’s report. The paper did correct the error the next day, not just on Page A2 but in the front-page portion of the followup story, which I thought was a classy way to handle it.

As for how it happened, Allah’s theory sounds plausible: “[Levin] must have held a conference call and inadvertently read to them out of his own office’s report, not the IG’s. Sweet, sweet justice for the leakhive.” For her next column, Deborah Howell should talk to the reporters involved (Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith) and find out.