Dumbudsman

Shorter Deborah Howell: "Talented people are liberal, so [to "balance" our paper] we'll hire more losers."

Update; [Maybe I went a bit too short.]

Other Update: Howell's assertion that people holding conservative ideas deserve protections like those that have been offered to historically oppressed groups like women and racial minorities is truly stunning. It deserves attention.

News Flash: World Unfair, Unbalanced

Deborah Howell is back at the counting game in her Washington Post Ombudsman's column this morning, carefully measuring every "positive" or "negative" Obama story the Post ran during the campaign to see if it was balanced by a similarly slanted story about McCain. I don't know whether she actually buys this foolishness or whether it's part of her job to pacify rubes who might buy the paper, but that's really beside the important and disappointing fact that this facile view of news and of the world exists within the upper echelons of American journalism.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time on this today, and not just because Howell simply repeats all of the errors I critiqued in her nearly identical column of last week. No, I'm not going to waste time on it today mostly because Deborah Howell is a dolt. This passage from early in her column today demonstrates that she doesn't even know the difference between news and opinion:

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces (58) about McCain than there were about Obama (32), and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

So "several conservative columnists" Broder, Will, Applebaum, Krauthammer, Cohen, Gerson, Hiatt, Hoagland, Ignatius, Mallaby, Marcus, Novak, Samuelson, Dana Milbank and Kathleen freaking Parker! didn't love JohnnyMac well enough. And this has exactly what to do with a news bias against the Republican?

Whooo-kay. But life (and especially Saturday morning) is too precious to waste any more of it on utter nonsense. Good luck with your special little world, Deborah.

The Simplistic Truth

Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell this morning:

Every day I hear from readers who tell me the reason The Post's print edition is losing readers and advertising is that (1) The Post is too liberal, (2) The Post has gone downhill with three buyouts in five years or (3) The Post is arrogant. Or all of the above.

Those notions are simplistic, but each holds a grain of truth. Let's consider them:
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(1) Neither the hard-core right nor left will ever be satisfied by Post coverage -- and that's as it should be. But it's true that The Post, as well as much of the national news media, has written more stories and more favorable stories about Barack Obama than John McCain. Editors have their reasons for this, but conservatives are right that they often don't see their views reflected enough in the news pages.

The Post's latest circulation losses were less than many large papers suffered, and business executives say the advertising downturn has more to do with the economy than with political coverage. That said, the imbalance still needs to be corrected.

[...]

(3) Arrogance. It is a disease easily caught by journalists, who can overlook its symptoms. We believe that we have a collective "nose for news" and the judgment to know best what readers need to know and how to present it. We believe in our own wisdom and experience and in the purity that keeps us out of politics and special-interest groups. We have our own rules, and we don't change them. We seldom ask for input from readers. We believe that if it weren't for us, the world couldn't be as well informed and democracy wouldn't operate as it should. But this sounds self-important to readers.

Does the Washington Post's ombudsman really believe that news -- or truth, for that matter -- is somehow symmetrical? Or that reader feedback is a mechanism for accurately measuring such a thing?

In addressing her readers' third complaint -- about the Post's "arrogance" -- Howell justifiably deplores the paper's dearth of issues coverage. But if The Post isn't covering issues, just how deeply can it be skewing "the truth"?

Isn’t it obvious that it's the quality and not the quantity of news coverage that the ombudsman should be attending to? Reading between the lines of this and other recent Howell columns, you can see that this is a point Post editors keep trying to impress upon her. But it's a point she simply refuses to accept.

Howell doesn't even seem to be able to keep the Post's news and opinion writers straight, as she shows us by pointing to columnist Ruth Marcus's issues coverage. As for the quality of Marcus's reporting, I guess Howell has missed her continuing efforts to bury the recent GOP Social Security bamboozlement. Howell also points with pride to Post contributor David Broder, who has steadfastly refused to express an opinion on such important issues as Sarah Palin's qualifications to be president.

Just a thought: It might be helpful to The Post's efforts to meet its challenges, to have an ombudsman qualified to accurately and honestly identify them.

They Write Letters

Why did I bother to read past this second paragraph of Deborah Howell's column this morning?

Last week, as usual, brought more bias complaints from Republicans. John Carver of Oakton wrote: "You and most Post employees may view your paper as fair and balanced. To me it is a far-left liberal rag."

Actually this later paragraph almost redeemed my effort:

Mundy's piece also offended Grace Pimentel of Herndon, who said she is a Democrat: "You ran a . . . fluff piece . . . with feel-good, beautiful, happy, smiling photos and no relevance to the campaign. . . . Meanwhile your coverage of McCain and Sarah Palin is only negative and you run stories that rip them to shreds daily? I just can't see the Post ever running such a positive-only story for McCain!" Actually, there was one that day; more about that later.

Ahh, wingers (and "Democrats"). Life is sooo not fair.

Get used to it.

Count Deborah

In an exceedingly silly column, this week the Washington Post's Deborah Howell works on her counting. Through simple arithmetic -- "Democrat Barack Obama has had about a 3 to 1 advantage over Republican John McCain in Post Page 1 stories since Obama became his party's presumptive nominee June 4" -- Howell proves that the press loves Obama. Or something.

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Howell spends ninety percent of her column variously slicing and dicing the Post's coverage of the presidential race in vain search of a valid objective measure, but in the end she undercuts the entire project by quoting a less obsessive colleague:

Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, thinks that I'm wrong to put weight on numbers. "We make our own decisions about what we consider newsworthy. We are not garment workers measuring our product every day to fulfill somebody's quota. That means as editors we decide what we think is important, because that's what our readers look for us to do -- not to adhere to some arbitrary standard.

"The nomination of the first African American presidential nominee after a bitter primary campaign and his efforts to unite a party afterward were simply more newsworthy than a candidate whose nomination was already assured and who spent much of that time raising money. In the end, we can and should be judged on the fairness of our coverage, but that is a judgment that must be made over the course of the whole campaign, not a single period of time."

"[S]omebody's quota"! Oooh, snap! Take that, critics!

But as Frank Rich suggests this morning over at the NY Times, maybe a quota system would break the Bill Hamiltons of the press corps out of their comfort zone on "what we think is important" and "newsworthy" about St. John McCain:

So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they're "hearing too much" about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It's past time for that pressing educational need to be met.

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president's response to Katrina; he fought the "agents of intolerance" of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

Contrary to the implication of Howell's column, no news has been very good news for the McCain camp. McCain wins even when he loses.

Go figure.

Nonbudsman

Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell gets the facts fairly straight this week in a column on the Post's extreme misrepresentation of Obama's "I have become a symbol" statement. Unfortunately, her interpretation of those facts is completely wrong.

Long story short, Obama, addressing a closed House Democratic caucus meeting, said something to the effect that the accolades drawn by his candidacy are "not about me at all. It's about America. I have just become a symbol."

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According to Howell, Post political reporter and columnist Jonathan Weisman received a secondhand version of Obama's statement from an anonymous source. He posted that version of the statement to the online Post, together with this misleading spin:

...Barack Obama delivered a real zinger, according to a witness, suggesting that he was beginning to believe his own hype.

Importantly, the context Weisman provided for his version of Obama's statement reveals to close readers that his earlier spin contradicts what Obama actually said:

The 200,000 souls who thronged to his speech in Berlin came not just for him, he told the enthralled audience of congressional representatives. "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions," he said, according to the source.

Weisman shared the anonymous source's version of Obama's statement (together, presumably, with its exculpatory context) with his colleague at the Post Dana Milbank, who then tailored a highly misleading version of the quote to fit into a column he published the next day on Obama's "presumptuousness."

(Milbank later called readers complaining about his hatchet job "whiners." Howell accepts that Milbank was forced to give his readers what they deserved: "Milbank said he chose to answer some nasty attacks with humor." Tee fucking hee.)

Howell's primary conclusion (among several even sillier ones) is that the reporters shouldn't have relied on an anonymous source. But according to Howell herself, the anonymous source provided Weisman and Milbank with an essentially accurate version of Obama's statement. It was the Post reporters rather than their source who, willfully or not, misconstrued Obama for the Post's readers.

Like Milbank (and according to her usual practice), Howell is at pains to undercut the validity of reader complaints. She describes this week's controversy as "an uproar among partisans," "partisan blogs" and "Obama fans." The hostile framing extends to the column's very headline, "The Anger Over An Obama Quote," casting as an irrational reflex the legitimate, reasonable and thoughtful critiques many readers made of these Post errors; and to the column's subhead on the Post's Opinion page, "Readers question the use of a quote in a story about [Obama's] presumptuousness," casting Obama's uppityness as a given fact warranting further discussion.

The Post has stubbornly refused to issue a correction even to the flagrant misrepresentation Milbank made of Obama's statement. According to Howell, "there's no tape to verify [the Obama camp's version of the quote], either, and Post editors refused to publish a correction." Apparently it doesn't matter that Weisman's version of the quote supports the Obama camp and flatly refutes Milbank.

So, once again, in her foolish zeal to unmask and resist partisan motivations and spin in complaints to the Ombudsman, Howell has managed to largely excuse an entire week's worth of partisan spin by the GOP and its assorted tools.

And so it goes.

Satire Stranger Than The Onion

WaPo Ombudsman Little Debbie Howell reports in her column this morning on a few of her typically small-bore, sideshowey concerns about fairness at the formerly great newspaper. Today she's bugged over this swipe a sailing columnist took at Bush: "As anyone who has lived in the United States the last eight years knows, a rudderless ship is not so good"; and by a link that appeared on the WaPo's home page to a video at the WaPo-owned The Onion.
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Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com executive editor, provides Howell a defense of the link to The Onion:

If everything we link to has to have the exact same standards as The Post, that would rule out an awful lot of good, interesting content. The word 'standards' applies to the way in which we do things and shouldn't be translated to mean that anyone who doesn't hold the same standards is wrong.

Which provides an opening for some "good, interesting" commentary on WaPo "standards" from several readers, among them cassidyt:

...[T]he ombudsman should be focusing on serious errors in the Post (of which there are many every day) and not on the inanities with which Howell concerns herself....

Let's just take an example. The Post has, for many months, evinced a willingness to completely dismiss the National Intelligence Estimate that concluded last fall that Iran has terminated its nuclear weapons program. There were two more instances of that this week. Richard Perle simply insisted, without the benefit of any supporting evidence, that the Iranian nuclear weapons program continues apace. Fred Hiatt, last Monday, grossly mischaracterized the NIE in his column on Iran.

Perhaps Ms. Howell could explain to her readers the Post's policies regarding the publication in its op-ed pages of purportedly factual assertions that are not only completely baseless, but contrary to the best available evidence. Does she feel the Post has an obligation to ask Mr. Perle to elaborate in his op-ed on the basis for his assertion that Iran maintains and active nuclear weapons program? Does she feel that the Post has an obligation to inquire as to whether Mr. Hiatt even bothered to read the NIE before grossly mischaracterizing it in his op-ed?

Ms. Howell has established that she can scrupulously comb the Post for any metaphor employed by its sports reporters that could be somehow interpreted as vaguely "anti-bush". But can she perform the ombudsman's principal task of elucidating for readers the journalistic tenets behind the Post's coverage of the most important issues of our day?

6/28/2008 6:28:33 AM

I'd say that's some "Blog Rage" you can believe in, Mr. Brady.

Troll House Nookie

Deborah Howell's report on the Charlotte Allen affair is in: turns out it was all just an ill-advised "bad joke." Howell makes little effort, beyond a nod to Katha Pollitt's letter of rebuttal, to actively refute the substance of the column. She accepts at face value everything Allen tells her about the piece -- even Allen's incredible claim that "half her mail was positive."

Interestingly, Howell also declares Allen's conservative ideological axe expressly off limits to criticism:

And this should have nothing to do with politics. Allen is a conservative, and Outlook should pay attention to conservative opinion.

What we're left with, once again, is a story largely about us -- the trusty, cranky, often-vicious left blogosphere -- Executive Online Editor Jim Brady's Blog Ragers of yore. It's a story perfectly encapsulated in Howell's headline, "The Outrage Over an Outlook Piece."

Once again, according to Howell, the Post's editors and staffers were "stunned at the outpouring of outrage" they received at our hands. Outlook assignment editor Zofia Smardz "didn't anticipate the fury of the Internet and the blogosphere, much of which seems to me to have either overlooked or missed the humor I saw." Outlook Editor John Pomfret, who admired the column's "very non-PC take," says he "expected the piece to be controversial, but...did not expect the intensity of the reaction":

It was a learning experience about the section, my job and our readership.

Yes, John, we're fucking craaa-ziiiiie -- maybe just crazy enough to try to hold you to account for your newspaper. You'd think you'd get that by now. After all, we keep reading pretty much this same Deborah Howell column about how stunned you are over our outrage. There was the Howell-Abramoff thing and then Brady's "Blog Rage" column; there was the Robin Givhan thing on Hillary's cleavage and then a Howell column; there was the Perry Bacon "rumors Obama's a Muslim" piece and then a Howell column; and there were undoubtedly others of this type I'm overlooking.

And the Post always ends up absolutely stunned at us. Which is odd, considering that the Post readily admits it's essentially trolling for attention with these predictable "controversies":

If columnists aren't interesting and provocative, they won't be read. No newspaper wants to receive thousands of protests, but that is not as serious a problem as having readers turned off by dullness. A provocative commentary that might result in protests will win every time over a ho-hum column that readers would pass right over.

So rage on, folks. But know it's all about the hits.

Blog Rage Redux

Shorter Li'l Debbie Howell and the WaPo editorial staff:

You lefties (including our own Tom Toles) are mean and unreasonable and your "Blog Rage" trumps any old bullshit we decide to publish.

The story in contention this time around is Perry Bacon Jr.'s 11/29/07 "Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him." Here's an actual quote on the story from Perry's editor, Bill Hamilton:

I thought that in this context saying it was a rumor meant it wasn't true, but clearly some people didn't see it the same way.

Because everybody knows rumors aren't true. So feel free to list yours in comments.

I've They've Fallen and I They Can't Get Up

Shorter David Broder: "Why can't the Democrats negotiate in good faith with President Bush? I seriously don't get it."

Meanwhile, one of Broder's fellow clueless denizens of the Sunday Post Op-Ed page, Deborah Howell, may have found a nut:

If columnists aren't interesting and provocative, they won't be read. No newspaper wants to receive thousands of protests, but that is not as serious a problem as having readers turned off by dullness. A provocative commentary that might result in protests will win every time over a ho-hum column that readers would pass right over.

Has David Broder been having his way with us these past couple of years? Is his incessant yearning for an impossible "bipartisanship" just a pose to maximize his audience? Can he really be so canny?