The Agora

Today, Salon jumps in:

The Vietnam War was full of dark chapters, but last month the Toledo Blade uncovered one of the bleakest. The family-owned newspaper published a four-part series detailing how, in 1967, an elite Army paratrooper unit named Tiger Force went on a seven-month killing spree in South Vietnam, targeting unarmed farmers, women and children. The paper also uncovered for the first time that a secret four-year Army investigation had concluded that 18 members of Tiger Force had committed war crimes, but no charges were ever brought. Instead, the investigation was simply filed away in 1975, during Donald Rumsfeld's first run as secretary of defense.

The series, "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths," stands as a sterling piece of investigative journalism, and with its rich, smart storytelling, it seems certain to be a Pulitzer Prize finalist come next spring. Yet, to date, the remarkable effort has received relatively little pickup in the mainstream American press. Internationally, it has gotten enormous play.

Visions of Pulitzers have been dancing in the heads of various people over at The Blade since the day the article appeared, Last week, Eric Alterman raised some of the same points as the Salon article, and also called the original piece "pullitzer-quality."

Local reaction to the series was mixed, but mostly positive. The Blade has been careful to air the negative comments, but it is clear that most readers understood the paper's reasons for publishing the story, and the need to print it.

[One very tiny, nit to pick: the name of the newspaper is The Blade, Toledo is not part of the name of the publication. Though the error is common even here, and the name of the paper's website istoledoblade.com.]
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