Washington Post

Somehow, The Washington Post always picks Sundays for articles on how God makes mistakes. Screaming at the top of Sunday’s paper was a picture of a little girl getting her head buzzed with the headline “TRANSGENDER AT FIVE,” and “She first declared she was a boy when she was 2 years old. Her parents brushed it off by slowly concluded this wasn’t just a phase." This wasn't news. It was propaganda, and if you don't like it, they dare you to cancel your subscription.

The article, by liberal Post columnist (and former reporter) Petula Dvorak, naturally referred to how everyone has grown to know “transgenders” from Chaz Bono on “Dancing with the Stars.” It also repeatedly rejected scientific fact in referring to this troubled girl in male terms like “he” and “his” – including the “instructional” video the Post put online.

Three NATO protesters were in court Saturday facing terrorism charges for allegedly planning to bomb Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house.

The Washington Post published an article about this Saturday and mysteriously waited until the third paragraph to inform readers the trio were Occupy activists:

We all know that the radical left has no sense of humor, but does the Washington Post have to encourage them by devoting stories that legitimize their absurd petitions? The Saturday Post's Style front-page devoted 22 paragraphs to two Occupy D.C. protesters who ginned up a petition effort against, of all things, Fojol Brothers, a popular D.C. street food truck whose employees don turbans and wear fake mustaches as they serve up ethnic cuisine.

At time of the article's publication, the petition -- which objected to an "Orientalist and racist appropriation of South Asian and East African cultures" -- had a paltry 950-some signatures on Change.org, a left-wing petition site. What's more, Post staffer Tim Carman waited until paragraph 14 to disclose that petition author Arturo J. Viscarra's comrade-in-arms/roommate Drew Franklin "is the son of the Post’s Travel editor Zofia Smardz." 

When it comes to opposition research, there is often only one difference between a candidate’s vicious negative ad and an “investigative” news report: the undeserved patina of media “objectivity” and respectability.

Take the Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz 5,400-word “expose” on how Mitt Romney may have pinned a boy down and cut his hair, in 1965. 1965. That’s almost a half-century ago. Even if every detail were accurate – and they weren’t – a journalist could pull a muscle in the hyper-aggressive attempt to make it somehow relevant to the present moment, or even the recent past.

"I’ve never understood the opposition to gay marriage." That's the confession with which Sally Quinn -- the agnostic, liberal editor of the Washington Post's "On Faith" religion section-- began her May 11 column. But rather than humbly seek an understanding of the religious faith that informs the beliefs of millions of American Christians, Quinn launched into an attack on them by comparing them to opponents of the racial integration of the nation's public schools.

History, Quinn insists, is on the side of the eventual societal and legal acceptance of same-sex marriage, and those who stand in the way will one day be haunted by it, living their lives knowing how wretched they were to oppose progress in the first place:

Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on Friday lambasted the Washington Post for its pathetic hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

"If while Governor of Massachusetts, Romney shaved Barney Frank's head, then you might have a story. But a prep school prank?" incredulously asked O'Reilly. "The Romney story means nothing, period" (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

Thursday's CBS Evening News and Friday's CBS This Morning spotlighted the Washington Post's reporting on the accusation that Mitt Romney supposedly bullied a high school classmate almost 50 years ago. Evening News anchor Scott Pelley trumpeted how "what [Romney] said about it today made it relevant again." Political director John Dickerson touted how "the reporting of the story seems pretty solid."

Correspondent Jan Crawford reported on the Romney issue on the evening and morning newscasts. During the Thursday report, Crawford highlighted how one former classmate of Romney's labeled the alleged incident an "assault and battery." The following morning, she did contrast the allegation with President Obama's admitted drug use during his high school years and President Clinton claiming he tried marijuana, but "didn't inhale."

If you doubted where many journalists stand on gay marriage, don’t. The Newspaper Guild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), joined with other unions, such as the AFL-CIO, in expressing its support for Obama on homosexual marriage. President Larry Cohen of the CWA stated: 

 "The Communications Workers of America stands with the President and those who support equality and human rights.”

Friday's off-lead New York Times story by Mark Landler and Jeff Zeleny portrayed a triumphant Obama and his likely November opponent Mitt Romney on the defensive after Obama's announcement that he now supports gay marriage: "Obama Campaign Pushes the Issue Of Gay Marriage – Romney Avoids Subject – Biden Said to Apologize Over Comment That Hastened Action."

As the president traveled to the West Coast on Thursday, where in Seattle he said Americans should have the chance to succeed “no matter who you love,” his presumptive challenger, Mitt Romney, and Republican leaders in Congress, tried, with limited success, to steer the focus of the presidential campaign back to the nation’s sluggish economy.

At the end of a full report on Friday's NBC Today, based on a Washington Post hit piece that accused Mitt Romney of bullying of a gay high school classmate, correspondent Peter Alexander admitted the story may be false: "NBC News isn't naming the student who was allegedly bullied....Late last night, his sister told NBC News that his portrayal in the Washington Post story is 'factually incorrect'..."

Despite that important detail, the network morning show still decided to promote the accusations. At the top of the show, co-host Ann Curry teased: "Prep school bully? Mitt Romney responds to a report that as a teenager he led a bullying incident of a classmate who later came out as gay....Could an incident that happened nearly 50 years ago impact the presidential race?"

It is customary when a newspaper makes an after-publication correction or change to an article for it to notify readers that an alteration has taken place.

Some time after the Washington Post published a 5000-word hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney Thursday, a key edit was made to the article without such a notification.

The original piece mentioned the following:

For months, the Obama-loving media have been carping and whining about all the money going to conservative Super PACs in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling back in 2010.

Yet as you can see from the following segment on MSNBC's Martin Bashir show Thursday, the press are giddy over the prospect the president will raise up to $15 million at actor George Clooney's campaign event later this evening (video follows with transcript and commentary):

If the people who run the Washington Post Company need an archetypal example of why their newspaper publishing segment is in so much financial trouble (as found here: a $22.6 million first-quarter 2012 loss following on the heels of an $18.2 million loss for all of 2011) and is bleeding customers (per the Audit Board of Circulations, the paper's daily and Sunday circulation dropped by 7.8% and 15.7%, respectively, during the year ended March 31), they only need wonder why the paper's editors tasked Jason Horowitz, with help from Julie Tate, to produce what turned into a 5,400-word writeup ("Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents") on Mitt Romney's high school years in the mid-1960s which appeared Thursday.

One can tell by the headline alone that it's an attempt at a hit piece. Horowitz led with the most damning incident he could find, and somehow gave it anti-homosexual overtones:

Yesterday morning, the Washington Post published a drawing by Tom Toles in which the liberal cartoonist depicts a minister marrying two men, with the speech bubble reading, "If anyone here objects to the marriage of these two men, speak up now because opponents are aging and dying off and soon won't matter anymore..."

In his trademark depiction of himself in the corner reacting to the graphic, Toles depicts himself asking "Is it okay to yell 'Hurry Up'?" So to borrow from the former Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson (Fla.),  does Tom Toles want same-sex marriage opponents to "die quickly"? [Cartoon depicted below page break]

The Obama Palace Guard is waging a losing battle to suppress the truth in a new ad from Americans for Prosperity, which explains how more than $2 billion in “stimulus” money went to foreign companies.

The “Wasteful Spending” ad, airing in 8 states with a media buy of $6.1 million, has also drawn criticism from the self-styled arbiters of political truth at the Washington Post.

You can imagine why: Obama promised the “stimulus” would “create or save” millions of American jobs, but with election day now less than six months away and millions more Americans jobless than before Obama took office, an ad questioning why Obama sent tax dollars to foreign companies really undermines the  campaign's efforts to distract people.

Imagine President Barack Obama leaning hard into Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, pressing him to support a piece of legislation or, say, introduce a budget bill that has been MIA for the past three years. Obama is a real go getter and has been burning up the phone lines until late at night to convince legislators to support him. He even invites a number of people from Capitol Hill to join him for rounds of golf where he continues the art of persuasion.

Hard to believe that fantasy? Well, that is what the Washington Post opinion writer Richard Cohen is fervently wishing for. Cohen's magic genie wish, inspired by the newly published Robert Caro book, The Passage of Power, is that Obama will do a complete U-turn on his introverted, hands-off personality and become like Lyndon B. Johnson. Here is Cohen going into flights of fantasy on this topic in his latest column with the somewhat less than ringing endorsement title, What Obama doesn’t know about being president:

Yesterday I noted how two Washington Post reporters, Andrew Higgins and Keith Richburg, studiously refused to tag Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng as a "human rights activist." Curious about whether the Post has ever described him as such in its reporting, I did a Nexis search.

What I found was that at no time in the past few weeks has Chen -- whose work included shedding a spotlight on forced abortions in China -- ever been described by a Post reporter as a "human rights activist" or "human rights advocate." Curiously, however, the Post editorial board has directly and indirectly labeled Chen as one:

Last August, Politico revealed that the Obama campaign intended to make Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney "a sort of political Gordon Gekko" if he won the nomination.

Right out of that playbook, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Monday compared Romney to the financial villain of the '80s movie classic "Wall Street" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Fifty-six percent of Virginians approve of Republican Bob McDonnell's job as governor and 49 percent believe the Old Dominion is on the right track. That contrasts with a 47 percent average approval rating for President Obama and an average of 32.7 percent of Americans who believe the country is on the "right track."

Yet the Washington Post chose to spin the polling numbers as a negative, noticing a downward trend from previous numbers and attributing the shift to "a contentious legislative session that drew large protests and national ridicule to the state Capitol."

On Monday’s front page, The Washington Post promoted “liberal hero” Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat looking to retake the “Ted Kennedy seat” in the Senate. “Stakes high as liberal hero tries to unseat GOP senator,” read the headline. On Sunday, the Post’s Chris Cillizza said Warren had the “Worst Week in Washington” for her muddled answers to claiming she was of Native American heritage in professor jobs for a decade.

But it wasn’t the “worst week” in the Post – they ran no news story on the controversy until Monday, but in this Karen Tumulty story, it was completely buried until paragraph twenty:

"Russia's top military officer told a conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials that Russia would mount a preemptive strike on U.S.-led NATO missile defense facilities in Eastern Europe if Washington goes ahead with its plan to build a missile shield," the Associated Press has reported.

The Washington Post carried the 5-paragraph story, but buried it on page A6 of the May 4 paper under the headline, "Military ups the ante on missile defense."

There's real paradox in romanticizing squalid, rat infested tents in one section of your publication while in another advising well-heeled readers where to buy a $5,000 Chippendale rug. But such is life at a liberal big-city newspaper.

The Washington Post swooned over the Occupy Movement last year, devoting thousands of words and gallons of ink to covering the complaints of the self-described 99 percent, which claims “to fight back against the richest 1% of people that are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future.” The Occupy Movement is calling for a general strike on May 1, and the Post is now itching to favorably cover Occupiers.

Left-wing Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten is no stranger to NewsBusters criticism. From calling the Tea Party "A posse of ignoramuses" to fantasizing about bludgeoning Ron Paul-supporting folk singer Arlo Guthrie, we've called Weingarten out on his unfunny forays into slamming conservatives and libertarians who don't share his liberal politics.

Well, this weekend Weingarten topped himself by suggesting that a suitable protest of the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court would be to defecate in front of police officers. Weingarten was venting his frustration at a Supreme Court ruling penned by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy which held that it's not an unreasonable search for jails to strip-search arrestees, even those charged with minor infractions:

In Saturday’s Washington Post, religion columnist Lisa Miller brought her usual radical feminism to the table insisting Mary be “heard” as the Vatican insisted that American nuns and sisters actually act like they belong to the Catholic Church.

But this line stood out: “For more than a thousand years, women like Mary have entered religious life hoping to find a safe place where they might receive an education and protection from the oppression of marriage and the dangers of child-bearing.” The oppression of marriage?

"Behind the ads, faceless donors," blared a front-page headline in today's Washington Post. "Disclosure rare as groups spend on general election," complained the subheading to Dan Eggen's April 26 story. "Nearly all of the independent advertising being aired for the 2012 general-election campaign has come from interest groups that do not disclose their donors, suggesting that much of the political spending over the next six months will come from sources invisible to the public," Eggen lamented in his lead paragraph.

Anonymous campaign spending and hence anonymous political speech really irks the Citizens United-obsessed liberal media. But the hypocrites in the press use anonymous speech all the time as integral to, well, their political speech, their freedom of the press. In fact, Eggen himself has used anonymous sources -- including Super PAC staffers and campaign donors -- at least six times thus far this year, according to a Nexis search of the Washington Post with the terms "condition of anonymity" and "Dan Eggen."

In his "The Fix" blog yesterday, Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza uncritically furthered a faulty Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) that argues that President Obama has actually received more negative news coverage this political season than the Republican presidential primary contenders. This morning, Post print edition editors excerpted Cillizza's item on page A4, the "Campaign 2012" news page.

While Cillizza noted in his blog post that there are "mitigating factors" in the survey data -- that langauge was cut from the print edition excerpt -- he confidently asserted that "for all the chatter about Obama’s preferential treatment by the media, the data tells a very different story. And the data doesn’t lie." But as my colleague Rich Noyes explained on Monday, the data examined by the study are fundamentally flawed and hence worthless to arrive at a conclusion about the media's judgments of the candidates (emphases mine):

So, uh, have you heard that the Catholic Church is working up a "crackdown" on nuns? Of course you have, as time and again the media have been repeating the charge. Well, today Sally Quinn, the agnostic editor of the Washington Post's On Faith feature, joined in the fun with her April 24 screed about "A Catholic 'war on women.'"

From start to finish, Sister Sally poured forth bilious attacks on the Catholic Church. Here's how she opened her screed: