First, the Ombudsman always appears in the paper's B section. Second, the Ombudsman is commonly where retractions & corrections are printed in many papers.
Third, this is not the first time the
Post revealed its error. Did you read the whole article? Did you miss these bits?
"Readers, properly, continued to demand answers about whether the paper was ducking the implications of the Esquire piece. "The Post's piece turned Jumana Hanna into an icon, one used by the Bush administration to justify the war," one reader charged.
"Ultimately, The Post did the right thing in
re-reporting this story and laying out all the flaws. Headlined "Threads Unravel in Iraqi's Tale," it appeared Thursday on Page A18, and there was a small reference to it on the front page. That it was well inside the paper on Inauguration Day* annoyed those who were initially critical. They have a point. This was a big and powerful front-page story, with pictures, 18 months ago, and correcting the record deserved more prominence.
~snip~
". . . . The Post, in the view of one reader, "is still failing" in what it considers newsworthy about the war."
* About the story appearing deep inside the A section: they ran it on inauguration day, and if you have to ask why you'd have to ask the editor. No matter: IMO one can't really fault the
Post for plastering its front page w/ inaugural news. It is, after all, the leading newspaper in the nation's capitol. The
Post has no love for the Bush administration -- anyone who regularly reads the editorial page knows this -- and the inauguration of a fraud is just as newsworthy as the inauguration of someone who deserves the office.
edit: here's a link to the 1/20 article on A18:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22249-2005Jan19.html