Uh-Oh: Washington Post Sending Repeat Offender at Corrections Box to Iraq

Erick at Redstate reports The Washington Post seems to have a new way of punishing young reporters whose factual sloppiness draws the repeated notice of the Corrections editor and the ombudsman – they send them to Iraq. The reporter in question is one Amit R. Paley, a recent Harvard graduate and former Post summer intern in 2004. Fishbowl DC found an internal memo boasted:

Amit has been breaking story after story this year on the national education beat, including the disclosure of improper searches of a massive federal database of student records and extravagant spending by a non-profit loan company.

Redstate offers the rebuttal:

Getting his big break on the front page of the Washington Post in April, Paley wrote a host of hard hitting articles citing his leading source as a "senior official," "senior agency official," and even a "presidential appointee." Unfortunately, WaPo had to run a correction admitting that the source was none of the three.

Weeks later, Paley returned to the front page without fact checking. On April 21, 2007, Paley wrote, "The No. 3 official in the U.S. Department of Education, who oversees the student loan industry, had more than $10,000 invested in student lenders, according to documents released last night."

The fact was that the husband of the official owned the stock via a 401(K) and sold it before his wife faced Senate confirmation.

Instead of running yet another correction, WaPo just sneaked in two paragraphs in *a different story* mentioning these facts. This sneaky way to correct their prodigy's record even upset WaPo's ombudsman who called the handling "problematic" and wrote that the correction "should have had its own headline and more prominent display."

No surprise, but just months later Paley was at it again. He ran a story with the headline "Ex-Aides Break With Bush on 'No Child'; Conservatives Giving Vent To Doubts; Support for Opt-Out Proposal Grows." The headline was totally out of context and Paley purposefully used sources out of context to make his point. What'd he do? He blamed his editors.

What'd the editors do? They changed the headline online and softened portions of the story. The original headline and inaccurate story remained in the print edition without correction.

Paley has, in his brief career, made repeated, serious errors in his reporting. Each of his errors portrayed the Bush Administration in a very bad light, enough to garner criticism from Deborah Howell, WaPo's own ombudsmen.

So, realizing they need to do something to get Paley off the Education beat and stop the embarrassing need to substantively correct his front page stories, WaPo has come up with a great idea. They are sending him to Iraq as a war correspondent.