BROOKE GLADSTONE: On April 3rd the Washington Post ran a story about the capture and rescue of Private Jessica Lynch under the headline "She Was Fighting to the Death: Details Emerging of West Virginia Soldier's and Rescue." This past Tuesday the Washington Post ran another story about Lynch. This time the headline read: "A Broken Body, A Broken Story Pieced Together." In the April story we learned that the fearless 19 year old had emptied her rifle into enemy soldiers before being stabbed and shot by them. This week, that was revised. Lynch had tried to fire her weapon, but it had jammed. She did not kill any Iraqis. She was neither shot nor stabbed. In the April story, the heroic rescue of Lynch was described as a classic special operations raid with U.S. commandoes and Blackhawk Helicopters engaging Iraqi forces on their way in and out of the medical compound. But according to this week's story, Iraqi combatants had left the hospital a day earlier, leaving Lynch in the hands of doctors and nurses who said they were eager to turn her over to the Americans! We wondered why the story required so much correction. Dana Priest is a staff writer for the Washington Post and contributed to both stories. Dana, welcome to the show!

DANA PRIEST: Glad to be here, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you were part of the April 3rd team. What went wrong there?

DANA PRIEST:What went wrong is that we relied as we often do on the first initial intelligence reports that were coming out of the field. Jessica Lynch had been rescued -- so we started to try to figure out what her ordeal had been like. That version of events came from a smattering of intelligent reports coming both from the military and the CIA on the ground on the day that she was captured.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you happen to see David Kirkpatrick's piece in the New York Times this week?

DANA PRIEST: Yeah.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:One of the things he says is that the initial portrayals of the story raised questions about whether the U.S. military manipulated the episode for propaganda purposes and whether American news organizations were seduced by a gripping, patriotic tale.

DANA PRIEST:We did try, in our reporting, to answer the question for ourselves: were we manipulated in our first efforts? Did the Pentagon manipulate the media into believing that the raid was one thing that it wasn't? As you remember, there was that BBC report that said that the raid was staged. Well, when they gave their briefing about the raid, the Pentagon said that no shots had been fired inside. They didn't elaborate much on the welcome that they got and the situation that they encountered. The media shorthanded the raid and it became a, a dramatic event, which I'm sure it was, but in no way do I think it was staged.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Pentagon officials brushed off questions about why they didn't rush to correct the record on certain details because the fog of war and the fog of war they would invoke again and again, and, and do you think this is an adequate excuse?

DANA PRIEST:Well I think it's only partly an excuse. If you look at where the Pentagon was in the war, you see that they had a lot of criticism of that time and they had, you know, 11 soldiers who had died in captivity, and that was certainly bad news. So I think they had an obvious motive to make sure this story got a lot of play, but I don't think they went about it in quite as active a way as has been suggested by some, some reporting on this.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Michael Getler [sp?], your ombudsman over there at the Post, suggested in a column on April 20th that, quote, "It was at a crucial point in the war and my instinct was to be very skeptical. It had a strong propagandistic twinge to it." Do you think the reporters could have been more skeptical?

DANA PRIEST:Well what we did with our skepticism is readable. We tried to craft a paragraph that made it clear that they were initial reports from the field, you know, and that that does not always turn out to be accurate.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. Getler suggested those were too far down in the story.

DANA PRIEST:Right. You know, he's right about that. They should have been higher up. The whole notion that it became propaganda was something that was surprising to us in a sense because we were doing what reporters do in the midst of the very chaotic situation like war is for us as well which is just trying to get as much information we could from people that we trust and to use the filter that we always use, and in this case I really don't feel that we used any different kind of filter.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:One of the great things about this week's story is not only the exciting story that it tells, just as the first was, but how revealing you are of the process you used to tell the story!

DANA PRIEST:Right. And from the questions that came up after -- the ones you're posing and other people have posed, our ombudsman, posed -- we all thought we had an obligation to say well how did we report the first thing first and now we're telling you a different story? I don't feel we did anything wrong in the initial reporting but what we're trying to do is give you a window into well how did that happen?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what lessons do you think can be drawn from how the Jessica Lynch story continues to unfold?

DANA PRIEST:Well I think there's two lessons -- one for reporters and one for the public, I guess. For reporters -- when you're dealing in an intense environment like a war -- tell people in a clear way or in a way that somehow is accessible to them that these are initial reports from the field. The second lesson is somewhat like the first for the, the reading audience -- the watching audience -- is that the fog of war is a real thing, and the fog of reporting about war is a real thing. We had so much more access because of the imbedded media, but when you go back and piece together what those reports were saying about where people thought their units were at that time it turns out in some cases to be very different than where they actually were. It's the most chaotic environment to be in, and that's just the way that it is!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dana, thank you very much.

DANA PRIEST: Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Washington Post staff writer Dana Priest is author of The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military. Coming up, more about correcting the record in newspapers, on the internet and in the public's mind, and one story that resists a definitive answer -- the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. This is On the Media from NPR.