Tag Results for Washington Post

Civil War: Washington Post columnist David Broder slammed colleague Dana Millbank for a column that characterized President Obama as a dope for not following Rahm Emmanuel's advice. Millbank insists that the column wasn't an Emmanuel plant, but the dustup has the Post airing it's dirty linen in public. Again.

Just when you thought it was safe to read the Washington Post again, there's been another example of editors falling asleep at the ethical switch.

This time, the story in question is a Dec. 31 report published in the Post, but written by The Fiscal Times, a new internet financial news start-up based in Washington D.C. The article was the first in what The Fiscal Times calls a "partnership" between itself an the Post.

According to the New York Times, the story reported support for "a proposed deficit reduction commission" but contained one glaring omission:

The primary expert quoted in the article is from the Concord Coalition, whose mission is also balanced budgets and limits on safety-net spending. But the article did not mention Mr. (Peter G.) Peterson, his backing of The Fiscal Times, that he was a co-founder of the Concord Coalition or that his foundation was a major underwriter of the coalition.

According to the Times, Peterson is a conservative billionaire investment banker who advocates deficit reduction and restrictions on entitlement programs. He is also the financial backer of The Fiscal Times and his son Michael is a top executive in the company.

The Post later ran a correction to the story, which said editors should have disclosed Peterson's connection to The Fiscal Times and the Concord Coalition.

Oh, and in case you missed my retweet of Dan Kennedy earlier in the week, this video appears to show that the Post didn't learn much from this.

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse inside the Washington Post, the paper of record for our nation's capitol has given itself another black eye.

Washingtonian magazine and other inside-the-Beltway media outlets are reporting that Pulizter-Prize-winning feature editor and ex-Marine Henry Allen got into a fistfight with reporter Manuel Roig-Franza. The fracas apparently started after Allen called a story Roig-Franza had co-written with reporter Monica Hesse "the second-worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years."

Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, whose issues with credibility in connection with the Post's recent pay-to-play scandal, was qouted in Politico saying: "We take this incident seriously and will address it appropriately."

It turns out that the Heene family wasn't the only group pulling the wool, however briefly, over the eyes of the media this week.

The Yes-Men, a group of liberal activists that recently put out a fake edition of the New York Post, managed to fool Reuters, CNBC, and Fox Business News into reporting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had dropped its opposition to climate change legislation. The New York Times and the Washington Post online sites were apparently caught in the net as well, due to their systems for automated posting of stories on Reuters.

The elaborate hoax was extremely well planned, with a web site, a realistic-looking press release, and actors playing both officials of the Chamber and members of the media during a "press conference" at the National Press Club.

My question is: Aside from the obvious child-exploitation angle and the danger and expense associated with giving a false report to emergency officials, is the Yes-Men's hoax so different from what Richard and Mayumi Heene allegedly did?

Washington Post columnist Robert Novak's death marks the further erosion of that most perishable commodity in the blogosphere/punditsphere that drives today's political news: a primary source.

So says Boston Herald Editorial Page Editor Rachelle Cohen. Cohen knew Novak, whose column with longtime writing partner Rowland Evans ran in the Post for 45 years, and often hosted him when he was in town.

"Most of the blogosphere is derivative," Cohen told me in an interview this morning. "He was the one with the sources, he was the one breaking the news."

First and foremost, she said, "he was just one of the best damn reporters in all of Washington, it wasn't just a matter of ideology. He was the quintessential Washington skeptic. He just did his homework and it's the kind of thing I wish more people did."

Much of the reporting about Novak's death has emphasized his July 14, 2003 column that blew CIA agent Valerie Plame's cover and the ensuing scandal that erupted after it became clear that the leak of Plame's identity was part an orchestrated campaign to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

To his harshest critics, the Plame column was an ideological hatchet job, but others - notably Jack Shafer in Slate - have taken a more nuanced view, maintaining that it was more a product of Novak's journalistic competitiveness than his political conservatism.

Cohen said it isn't necessarily fair to judge Novak by "one story in a 50-year career," but added that the Plame scandal can't be easily dismissed either. In the end, she said, it served a useful purpose.

"It did raise the whole discomfort level of confidential sources and how they use you," she said.

There must be something in the water over at the Washington Post.

First there was hideous "salons" idea where the Post nearly sold access to their journalists for cash at cozy, off-the-record dinners with corporate CEOs at the publisher's home. Now there's this.

After watching this video, I have two questions:

1. Who thought it would be funny to put Dana Millbank and Chris Cillizza in smoking jackets? And, 2. What exactly were they smoking?

(Note: Thanks for this one, Mark.)

After reading Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander's lengthy takeout on the paper's pay-to-play dinners scandal, it was hard not to come away with the feeling that the Post now has as big an issue with credibility as it does with ethics.

In his no-holds-barred story Sunday, Alexander skewered both publisher Katharine Weymouth and editor Marcus Brauchli for the "monumental" ethical lapse that almost led to the paper holding a series of off-the-record dinners at Weymouth's home where corporate types would pay $25,000 for the privilege of schmoozing Post writers and Obama administration officials. I found this sentence in particular extraordinary:

While Brauchli and Weymouth say they should have realized long ago that the plan was flawed, internal e-mails and interviews show questions about ethics were raised with both of them months ago.

That's Alexander basically questioning whether the editor and publisher of his own paper were truthful about their knowledge of the dinners (or "salons" as they were supposed to have been called) after rival Politico.com got hold of a flyer advertising the first event and blew the story open.

This issue has been raised before, particularly in the context of whether Weymouth and Brauchli threw the paper's new marketing guy, Charles Pelton, under the bus while minimizing their own role in the scandal. But Alexander's Sunday story goes deeper, showing that Pelton himself raised the question of whether the newsroom would be comfortable with the salons, and digging up an e-mail from Managing Editor Raju Narisetti to Brauchli saying that the use of Weymouth's home was a "bad idea for anything commercial."

So how did the plan get as far as it did? Money, answers Alexander. The Post is losing it and the salons were a way to earn it.

Here's Alexander's full story. It's a must-read for anyone concerned about the potentially disastrous effects of the current economy on American journalism.

The Washington Post apologized for soliciting lobbyists to pay for off the record access to the paper’s editors and reporters at the home of publisher Katharine Weymouth. It’s now been cancelled.  Is this a legitimate way to seek new revenues or is the Post selling its journalistic integrity?

Surprisingly, the Washington Post dinner-and-access-for-a-fee scandal doesn't have a nickname yet. Any suggestions? Pay-to-playgate? Weymouthgate? Salongate?

Now, using "-gate" to connote  scandal is beyond cliché, I know, but in this case I think it lends nice bit of symmetry. The newspaper that set the standard for independent watchdog journalism with Watergate has now almost undermined it in the most egregious manner imaginable. Almost.

Thankfully, Post publisher Katharine Weymouth cancelled the "salons" that were supposed to have brought journalists from the Post and officials from the Obama administration together with and lobbyists and CEO-types willing to pay anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 for the privilege.

And for a while there, it looked like the Post was going to be OK. A relatively new marketing guy, Charles Pelton, assumed the position under the bus and claimed that the marketing flyer that appeared on Poltico.com hadn't been seen by Weymouth or vetted by the newsroom. Newsroom officials, including editor Marcus Brauchli, said they were blindsided by the pay-for-play aspect of the salons.

But it didn't last. First Weymouth waffled on whether the concept of the salons was the problem or just the inelegantly aggressive wording of the flyer. Then Pelton told the Post's ombudsman that the concept of the salons, if not the flyer, was developed in concert with top newsroom officials. Then the Los Angeles Times reported that at least two invitations to members of Congress had been sent from Weymouth's personal e-mail account.

We'll see if there are any more shoes to drop this week. In the meantime, send along those nickname recommendations. This whole thing is so depressing, we might as well have some fun with it.

This appropriately skeptical report by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post on the presidential manipulation of yesterday's White House "news conference" raises a question -- how much longer will this be allowed to go on before the DC press corps quits rolling over and barks back en masse?

Milbank describes how White House staffers arranged for a "reporter" from the pro-Obama Huffington Post website to pop a softball question, and notes:

"During the eight years of the Bush administration, liberal outlets such as the Huffington Post often accused the White House of planting questioners in news conferences to ask preplanned questions. But here was Obama fielding a preplanned question asked by a planted questioner -- from the Huffington Post."

Ugh. Tonight's (potential) bag job is an "ABC News Event: Prescription for America" live from the White House, where the president will field questions about health-care reform. I'm sure those question won't be planted, the way the Bushies used to plant them at his phony "town meetings." After all, we now have change in charge.