WaPoWATB
by digby
So Deborah Howell clutches her pearls and takes another whiff 'o smelling salts. Once again the terrible rudeness of liberals who took issue with the fact that the Washington Post repeated slimy wingnut smears on their front page without making it crystal clear that these smears were untrue is offered as the primary problem. She rather perfunctorily addresses the facts and then finishes up with this little whine:
Hundreds of negative comments, e-mails and phone calls about the story came to The Post; only one e-mail to me was positive. Gregory Hays of Charlottesville was typical, though more civil than many: "When a newspaper's articles are providing fodder for its own editorial cartoonist, something is seriously wrong. . . . The article, which I read thoroughly, seemed to give some credence to the campaign to smear Senator Obama as a closeted Muslim, if only by the fact that it was given a place on the front page instead of being buried on page 70 or so as an utterly baseless rumor being put out."
Apparently, that is completely unreasonable:
Hamilton said, "Reasonable people can disagree on this. But the people I have heard from are not reasonable. What I find especially disheartening is the idea that our motives are simply assumed to have been malicious."
This is the new world mainstream journalists live in, one that will continue to be explored in this column.
Oh boo hoo. I'm sorry the "new world" mainstream journalists live in is so unpleasant, but from the readers' point of view, the "world" hasn't changed --- we are just participating now. I would have been just as angry and upset at that story ten years ago. In fact, I was. And there were many of them. The only thing new about this is that they are hearing from us now --- we've been thinking it for a long time.
I understand that nobody likes to have their motives maligned. But as someone who has been doing battle online for nearly five years, I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of the people who complained about that article weren't actually maligning their motives (although considering the stance of the editorial page these days, it wouldn't be all that out of line) but rather they were maligning their professional ethics and practices. The problem is that they failed to report these "rumors" as categorically false, which they are.
Even if their critics were questioning their motives, it doesn't change the fact that the editors of the paper put rightwing oppo trash on the front page of the Washington Post with a halfhearted refutation. It's not like this is the first time this has happened, after all. In fact, it was so common during the eight years of the Clinton administration that the Wapo's credibility remains severely tattered. This reaction didn't happen in a vacuum.
Rather than continuing to be reflexively defensive when these things come up, it's long past time for the Washington Post to do a little soul searching and recognize that an awful lot of people just don't trust them anymore. Maybe they should put a reporter on it.
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