Yet despite the news peg, the mainstream media demonstrated a breathtaking lack of interest. According to TVEyes, an around-the-clock monitoring service, between May 1 and June 6 the story received approximately 20 mentions on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS combined. (With Blair's arrival in Washington Tuesday, there was a slight spike in mentions but still very little reporting of substance.) By contrast, during the same five-week period, the same outlets found time to mention 263 times the tabloid controversy that erupted when a photograph showing Saddam Hussein in his underwear was leaked to the British press.

Since the Times of London published the memo on May 1, White House spokesman Scott McClellan has held 19 daily briefings, at which he has fielded approximately 940 questions from reporters, according to the White House's online archives. Exactly two of those questions have been about the Downing Street memo and the White House's reported effort to fix prewar intelligence. (Three weeks after the memo was leaked in Britain, McClellan prefaced a response to a question about it by telling White House reporters he was not familiar with "the specific memo.")

Until Tuesday, the number of U.S. newspaper articles reporting on the Downing Street memo could be counted on two hands, including two articles in the New York Times, two in the Washington Post (print edition), and one each in Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Chicago Tribune. Only the Chicago Tribune article ran on Page 1, and it focused on how little commotion the memo had caused in the United States, noting, "The White House has denied the premise of the memo, the American media have reacted slowly to it and the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war." Additionally, Knight Ridder's Washington bureau covered the story for its chain of newspapers.

Looking back, Jim Cox, USA Today's senior assignment editor for foreign news, says not reporting on the memo was a mistake. "I wish we'd had something in early on, and I wish we'd been able to move the memo story forward. I feel like we missed an opportunity, and that's my fault," he tells Salon. But Cox takes issue with readers who complain that Americans have been kept in the dark about the memo's revelation that Bush had made up his mind on going to war long before he approached the United Nations and asked for a coalition to be formed. "The memo doesn't say something we haven't heard in one way or another over the last two and a half years," Cox says.

If the mainstream media showed little interest in the memo and its ramifications, those outside elite newsrooms did. On Tuesday, a query on the blog search engine Technorati retrieved 3,039 sites on which the Downing Street memo was being discussed.

"It's something that's struck a chord among NPR listeners and newspaper readers," Dvorkin says. "It may have been blog-induced in the beginning, but now it has legs of its own."

Across the country readers have been badgering their local newspapers to examine the memo story. None of the published correspondence appears to be form letters or so-called Astroturf letters designed to mimic grass-roots support for a particular issue. The letters have appeared in the Sunday Oregonian (Portland), Los Angeles Times, Raleigh News and Observer, Arizona Republic, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Anchorage Daily News, Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal, Greensboro (N.C.) News and Record, Berkshire (Mass.) Eagle, Newport (Va.) News Daily Press, Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call, Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Herald, Bangor (Maine) Daily News, Springfield (Ill.) State Journal-Register, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Modesto (Calif.) Bee and Tulsa World, among others.

With the exception of the Los Angeles Times, at the time the letters were published not one of the newspapers, according to the LexisNexis database, had reported on the memo.

Meanwhile, ombudsmen for the New York Times, the Washington Post and National Public Radio have all gone on record admonishing their own news organizations for slow-footed responses to the memo. The Post's Michael Getler, siding with upset readers, gave the paper a thumbs-down for its handling of the story. He noted that readers' "reaction to the failure to cover it, even with the hyperbole and worst assumptions about journalistic motives by some of the e-mailers, is understandable."

At the Times, public editor Byron Calame noted that the paper was quick with a memo story from London on May 2, "but the news coverage languished until this morning [May 20] when a Times article from Washington focused on the reaction to the memo there. This has left Times readers pretty much in the dark until today -- and left critics of the paper's news columns to suspect the worst about its motives." Responding to a query by Calame regarding the paper's lack of coverage, Times Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman suggested the Downing memo was old news: "Given what has been reported about war planning in Washington, the revelations about the Downing Street meeting did not seem like a bolt from the blue."

What's more, the reporting that was done in May was often less than stellar. The New York Times' belated follow-up on May 20 was less than 800 words long, and despite a headline that read "British Memo on U.S. Plans for Iraq War Fuels Critics," Times reporter did not interview a single war critic about the memo or its implications.

The issue was barely discussed on television, and when it did pop up, hosts appeared to have no interest. For example, here's the May 25 exchange between actor and activist Tim Robbins and Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball."

Robbins: I think there should be more discussion about the Downing Street memo and less about Newsweek. I think that that story seemed to be buried. And there seems to be a lot of questions that the Downing Street memo raises.

Matthews: Tell me about that.

Robbins: Well, it suggests that the administration knew full well they were being duplicitous and were operating with weak intelligence.

Matthews: Well, they -- well, they did tell us at the time, Tim, that the best argument for getting the Europeans to join us in the war was using the WMD argument, but it wasn't their primary purpose. The primary purpose apparently was democratization in the Middle East, nation building.

Robbins: And I think they didn't mention that until much later, Chris. I think that the original -- original reason was that [Saddam] was an imminent threat.

Matthews: Let me ask you about Hollywood. Do you think Hollywood, in its critique of this president, has been effective? Somebody put up a sign recently to Hollywood: "Thank you, Hollywood, for getting Bush reelected."

Playing catch-up this week has produced some awkward moments for reporters, such as Russert's referring to the memo as "famous" even though nobody at NBC News had ever bothered to report on it. On Monday, Fox News' online site reported that the memo "has received little attention in the mainstream media, frustrating opponents of the Iraq war," while failing to mention that Fox itself had effectively boycotted the memo story for five weeks. On Tuesday, Fox News finally reported that "there's been a lot of controversy recently about a memo that suggests British officials warned well before the war in July of 2002 that the Bush administration felt war was inevitable." Again, Fox failed to explain why the news organization had ignored a controversial story for more than a month.

That's just the latest press oddity surrounding the memo story, says Swanson at AfterDowningStreet.org. "It's very strange that when it now comes up in the media, it's described as well known. It's not well known. Most people don't know anything about the memo. It's very disturbing."

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