WashPost Hails "Undercover Reporter," Obscures Her "Feminist-Socialist" Views

The big article in the Washington Post Style section today puffs far-left author Barbara Ehrenreich, but reporter Bob Thompson doesn't exactly focus on her place on the political spectrum. (Hint: the former Time essayist likes the Communist Manifesto for its "timeless" message and its resemblance to the teachings of Jesus. Another hint: she also thought Haitian Marxist leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide was very Christ-like.)  He obscures it as he tries to sell her books "Nickel and Dimed " and "Bait and Switch," both covers pictured on Style's front page. Inside in the text box, she's described only as "Barbara Ehrenreich, undercover reporter."

The headline is "No Help Wanted: Author Exposes How the American Dream Turned Into a Middle-Class Nightmare." After the jump to page C-9, the headline is "Author Links Pounding the Pavement and Aching Souls."  In paragraph 14, Thompson briefly whispered: "Before long, her feminist-socialist take on the world was showing up in magazines like Ms. and Mother Jones." Take that paragraph out, and you get almost no clue of her radical views. Thompson concludes that Ehrenreich thinks it's bad for capitalism when "corporate culture creates a disconnect between achievement and reward." He's not so good at noting she WANTS it to go bad for capitalism.

PS: Ehrenreich also has fun with racism. In 1991, she described female conservatives as "spiritual descendants of the Women's KKK." And in a distant echo of the media's recent race-baiting Katrina vibe, there's this from Nightline that year: "I think there is racial prejudice in the media. There is a tendency to discount, or weigh less heavily, disasters to people who, not because they're remote so much, but are of a different skin color....I just mean that if there were a couple of million blonde, blue-eyed people facing starvation somewhere, I think the media coverage would be so intense we'd know their names by this time."