On Friday, House Majority Leader John Boehner told The Washington Post that he had told House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert about Mark Foley's page problem, and that Hastert assured him "we're taking care of it." The Post printed the quote. Later Friday, Boehner called back the Post to say he couldn't remember whether he'd spoken to Hastert, so the Post yanked the "we're taking care of it" quote from the final version of the article, as noted by Daily Kos. Since then, Boehner appears to have returned to his original version (TPMmuckraker). Perhaps the Post editors should have listened to their own press critic, who has some sage advice on how to deal with a flip-flopping politician.

On Monday, Howard Kurtz linked to Brad DeLong's criticism of the Post for excising the quote. But more daming was his Web chat that day, in which he appears to be referring to the Foley coverage without explicitly mentioning it:

New York, N.Y.: What is the journalistic rule when a politician gives you a quote, you put it in a story, then when the quote doesn't quite fit the story line the politician's political party has decided to pursue, he/she calls you up and asks to change the quote. Are you obliged to change it?

Howard Kurtz: Just the opposite. You're obligated NOT to change the quote. You can write, Senator Jones later called back to say such and such, if someone is trying to soften their remarks or claim a faulty recollection, but you can't deep-six the original comment.

Seems Kurtz is taking on some of the work of ombudsman Deborah Howell, who used her Sunday column to examine whether the paper's coverage of George Allen has been balanced.