While it is hard to summarize that much correspondence, the gist of it was this: The Times is ignoring the Libya story, and trying to protect the Obama administration, because of its liberal bent.
Conservative news outlets pointed to my post as evidence that The Times favored President Obama in its coverage.
My intention in writing it was far less grandiose. I wanted to make the case that the hearing had enough news value to display it on the front page — as most major newspapers did — rather than on Page A3. Jill Abramson, The Times's executive editor, and Dean Baquet, a managing editor, told me that the hearing did not break enough new ground to warrant the front page; they also said they were wary of its partisan politics.
The amount and vehemence of the reader response struck me as important. So I took two days this past week to reread all of The Times's Libya coverage since Sept. 12, the day after the attack.
I drew a couple of conclusions.
First, it is utterly wrong to say that The Times has ignored or buried the Libya story. As of Friday, editors had placed it on the front page on 18 days out of 38, sometimes with news, sometimes with analysis.
The coverage has been extensive, aggressive and sweeping. And I see no evidence that The Times is pushing the Obama agenda, overtly or otherwise. Many readers believe that it is, so I read with particular care on this subject.
Second, to be more critical, the Libya coverage has not consistently and effectively helped readers make sense of what is happening. The Times has not effectively connected the dots in a murky, fast-moving and difficult-to-report story.
I did see efforts to do that — most clearly in a strong question-and-answer article last Thursday by Scott Shane, a national security reporter. That article, however, did not appear on the front page but on Page A16.
And it came late in the game. The questions it tried to answer have been swirling for weeks. The article came about, according to Mr. Baquet and Susan Chira, an assistant managing editor, after Tuesday's presidential debate made it abundantly clear that confusion reigned.
The signal moment of the debate, in which the moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, tried to fact-check a dispute in real time, had become the topic of a new round of partisan wrangling. The issue was whether the Obama administration had "cooked the message" by blaming what happened on protests over an obscure anti-Islamic video when in fact there had been a planned terrorist attack.
The impetus for Mr. Shane's question-and-answer article "came directly out of the confusion at the debate," said Mr. Baquet. "Everybody agreed that it was necessary."
It was. But addressing those questions earlier — weeks earlier — and placing the explanatory piece more prominently in the paper would have helped readers make their way through the thicket. (It was displayed prominently on The Times's Web site.)
Why didn't that happen?
"One of the hardest things to do on a running story in a political season is to get away from breaking news and to make sense of it," Mr. Baquet said. When Mr. Shane is deployed to write such an article, he is pulled away from his beat, where The Times is trying to break new ground.
Still, Ms. Chira said, "I think we've explained it better than anyone. We've been very aggressive on the ground, and we've been trying to chart the political arc of the story as well."
The editors said that The Times's efforts were concentrated on two questions: 1) Was there a significant security failure at the consulate in Benghazi? 2) Did the Obama administration have much cleaner, clearer intelligence than it told the American people?
"What did they know and when did they know it?" Ms. Chira said. "I'm obsessed with that — we all are. It's hard to get."
But that is the aim.
"We want to render an ultimate verdict, but we don't have all the information to put that together," Mr. Baquet said. "The ultimate piece is not yet doable, but it's an active target."
Ms. Chira said another element is something that editors wrestle with daily: "How many times do you say the same thing?" That's a crucial question, and one that I might answer differently than top Times editors seem to.
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