Wanted: One Good Newspaper for the Washington Region

The Washington Post has lost its moral compass as well as its sense of what good journalism should be. Before getting to how their reporting standards have slipped, here’s a recent example of their losing their moorings completely when it comes to journalistic ethics.

As reported by Politico, the Post’s publisher, Katharine Weymouth, agreed to host a series of salons for lobbyists and industry executives to meet with officials from Congress and the administration, and with Washington Post reporters. The ostensible reason for the gatherings was to put business leaders together with government officials and journalists for collegial evenings discussing the important issues of the day. The first salon was to feature the topic of health care reform.

Well, for the $25,000 a pop for lobbyists and business executives to attend, it really turned out to be the Washington Post’s clumsy attempt to raise funds by selling access. Journalistic paygo,

The paper hastily backtracked and has been busy ever since apologizing and disclaiming its intention to do any such thing. But the Post has been shedding its reputation as a newspaper for a while now and this was just the latest sad incident in an inglorious recent history.

Just a few days ago, reporter and Post blogger, Anita Kumar ran with a brief story on the son of gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds. According to the Post, Austin (Gus) Deeds was arrested for underage drinking. Although the reaction of most readers, judging by the column’s comment section, was a big yawn, it is legitimate news, Not particularly interesting news, but nonethess, it was worthy of brief mention, just as the Bush twins alcohol-related follies were when they were under 21.

But something was missing from Kumar’s story. That something, the source of the information, was picked up by the Virginia Pilot:

His legal entanglement was unearthed through the research of political operatives. The national organizations of both parties are closely involved in this year's gubernatorial campaign, which pits Deeds against Republican Bob McDonnell.

In this case, the Virginia Pilot admitted they were fed the story by a political operative. And that part is every bit as newsworthy as the story itself. Yet Anita Kumar left that part out of her story.

Now, if Kumar had found out about the arrest through an independent search - and for investigative reporters, it would be pretty routine to Google names into various search engines - then she should have mentioned that in the story to shield herself from precisely this sort of blowback. But Kumar is not actually an investigative reporter, so it’s doubtful that she was the one pouring over the court records just randomly searching both candidates’ files for minor transgressions.

In fact, we know who did do that. It was another Washington Post reporter who reported that a few days earlier. Here is Roz Helderman's story on it, which even gives the identity of the young man who went to the Bath courthouse to do the opposition research for the Virginia GOP. He's Jared Wheeler, by the way.

So, not only did the Pilot do a better job of more fully reporting the entire story and allowing its readers to see and judge the facts in their entirety, it beat Kumar at something that she should have had the leg up on. All she needed to do, when running with this information, was to research her own newspaper, link to her colleague’s earlier piece, and she could have had the better and much fairer story.

But Kumar is not the first or only reporter at the Post to run with an insufficiently sourced, poorly researched, and inadequately reported story. She is merely the latest in a long line of disappointing journalists to do so.

The Washington Post has far too long a record of insufficient, incomplete, and biased reporting and it's not just coming from Kumar.

I've taken Amy Gardner to task several times for similarly incomplete or biased reporting. Here is an example. Additionally, I have also criticized reporter Michael Laris for his biased story here.

In addition to outright bias, both Gardner and reporters Tim Craig and Sandhya Somashekhar have published articles (here and here) about the influence of unions in Virginia without ever speaking to a Virginia labor leader.

In Somashekhar and Craig's story, the journalists interviewed Virginia Democratic leaders, Republican leaders, political scientist Bob Holsworth, and then spoke to a labor leader from Maryland to discuss Virginia's labor. In the other piece, Gardner quoted an official of the firefighters union. While some of the finest people I know are members of the firefighters union, if you are doing a piece on unions in general, and not just a specific union, you should be going to somebody who speaks for all of labor in the area, not just one union. At the very least, an attempt should have been made to interview Jim Leahman, the state AFL-CIO president, or Doris Crouse Mays, the secretary-treasurer. But right in Somashekhar's, Craig's, and Gardner's backyard, they have the largest Virginia central labor federation, any of whose officers would have been happy to talk to them about Virginia labor's participation in politics. Duh!

Are these reporters actually so ignorant of the organized labor movement that they don't realize that individual unions sometimes have competing interests and endorse different candidates, even in primaries. Do they not know that to get a real understanding of organized labor’s position on something, they should go to either go to the state AFL-CIO or a local central labor federation to get the most accurate answer – one that all the unions have voted on and agree to? Are they that ignorant – or do they just not care?

Or do their editors not care?

To be honest, the pattern of sloppy reporting is too pervasive to blame it on one reporter. I am willing to bet that some editor might have removed the sentence attributing the source of the information on Gus Deeds from Kumar’s piece or told Gardner, Craig, and Somashekhar not to bother getting any quotes from Virginia organized labor for an article on Virginia organized labor, insisting there wasn’t time to do it right.

Writers for major publications don't just get their stuff published without it being edited. These people are not bloggers, even if they write on-line columns that look like blogs. Their "blogs" actually are as heavily vetted by editorial staff as their print stories are. Further, good editors check their reporters’ facts and question them when there are obvious holes in their stories. So, if the information isn’t there, either some editor took it out or never insisted that it be included in the first place.

The Washington Post has simply gone off the rails in their biased and bad reporting and in other serious ethical lapses. And believe me, it’s not just the reporters’ fault. At this point, it’s so pervasive that I can safely attribute it to lazy and incompetent editors and a corrupt publisher.

Can somebody please start a new newspaper? I’m serious here.

Maybe if all the laid off reporters, who actually provided excellent journalism, were to band together and start up a non-profit newsgathering organization, the public would be better served than they are now by profit-losing media that can no longer find their moral compass and no longer posses business ethics.

Karen Duncan Puts the Hurt on Amy Gardner

Over at Anonymous is a Woman, Karen Duncan smacks down Washington Post reporter Amy Gardner on her Haim Saban "story" (in quotes because, at this point, it's basically b.s.). Here's Karen (bolding added for emphasis):

Meanwhile, Amy Gardner, back in the local Metro section of the Washington Post, wanted to put a little Virginia spin on the story. She probably also wanted to show her editors that she too could do investigative reporting, which, in her case, consists of looking up VPAP online, just as bloggers do. So, without fleshing out any of the details of this complicated story, she wrote the piece pointing out that Saban has contributed a large sum to McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign. Gardner also spun this as a possible huge embarrassment for McAuliffe. I’m not sure why it’s a problem right now for several reasons.

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I can forgive VA Blogger because he’s a partisan and an amateur citizen journalist. A blogger, who probably isn’t experienced at professional journalism. What he does for his side is as admirable as what any of my colleagues on the left do for our team. But Gardner is supposed to be a trained, unbiased reporter without a team in the game. Yet too often, her biases are like a small boat, tilting so far in one direction that it threatens to capsize completely. Even though she’s not in the big league, on the front page of the national section, she needs to do a better job of gathering facts, analyzing what she’s got and not violating such basic rules of logic as leaping to false conclusions, guilt by association, and misuse of evidence. That may be a lot to ask of a blogger, but it's not too much to ask of a real reporter.

Sad to say, but this smackdown of Amy Gardner is well deserved. Over the past few years, I've watched as Gardner - in the guise of an "objective" reporter - has shilled for the Davises - Tom and Jeannemarie. In addition, her reporting on the Metro to Dulles project, particularly on the no-bid contract to Bechtel and the Tysons Tunnel angles, was utterly abysmal. Frankly, I can think of a dozen bloggers right off the top of my head who are better reporters than Amy Gardner. The fact that she works for the Washington Post should give us all an idea as to why the corporate media is going down the tubes.