Washington Post

On Thursday, The Washington Post's Metro section put the Democrats' choice of “news” on the front page. “Democrats keep focus on abortion in Va. Race.” Post reporter Laura Vozzella relayed their outrage that GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli was caught by a Democrat tracker describing abortion as a moral evil like slavery, as did one of his big financial backers, the Susan B. Anthony List. 

On Friday, after the Washington Free Beacon reported that Cuccinelli's Democrat opponent Terry McAuliffe kept silent in 2008 as his candidate Hillary Clinton compared slavery to – get this – stripping Democrat convention delegates of their vote in two states, the Post put that Laura Vozzella story on B3. The Free Beacon headline was “McAuliffe Supported Slavery Comparisons Before He Opposed Them.”

A funny thing happened on the way to banning assault weapons in the deep blue state of Maryland. Some Democrats in the overwhelmingly-Democratic House of Delegates are considering amendments to reform the bill to carve out some exemptions. Given the composition of the state government, it may be the best bet that gun rights advocates in Maryland can realistically hope for in the short term, but to the Washington Post, it's a "gut[ting]" of Gov. O'Malley's proposal, even as House Democrats pushing changes say they are seeking to avoid banning guns merely on the basis of cosmetic features.

In his page B1 March 20 story, "Proposals would allow some semiautomatic rifles in Md.," staff writer Aaron C. Davis opened by lumping in "veterans and sportsmen" unfavorably with the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooter and the Beltway snipers by noting that "[s]ome semiautomatic rifles" that were "popular" with the former were used by the latter and could be legal under a revised gun ban in the Old Line State.

If you peruse the Washington Post online, you’d notice that the top five stories didn’t even mention Harry Reid’s egregious comments about the seven Marines that were killed in Nevada yesterday.  Likewise, although the fatal training accident itself was reported on page A3, Reid's comments were nowhere in the March 20 print edition.

On the Senate floor yesterday, Reid suggested a link between their deaths and the current budget sequestration. Here's what the Nevada Democrat said which the capital city's newspaper of record apparently finds unremarkable:

If liberals in the sports media have their way, your favorite sporting event will soon be a little more like an episode of “Glee.” Writers and talking heads at outlets from ESPN to NBC Sports are in a full-court press. They want to see openly gay athletes in American sports, no matter what it means for the games, the fans, or the athletes themselves.

Perhaps envious that their news colleagues get to cover – and advocate for – what a Washington Post reporter recently called “the civil rights issue of our time,” sports journalists have been long been obsessed with gay athletes. Commentator after commentator have taken to ESPN’s website to assure us “the issue of sports and homosexuality isn't going away,” to call a football player “intelligent and articulate athlete when he made a stand for gay rights,” and to wonder where the gay Jackie Robinson is.

A lengthy – 3,500 word – anguished expose on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post, “Hungering for a new month to begin,” about how people in Woonsocket, Rhode Island race to the grocery stores on the first of the month to spend their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payment, yet run out of food long before the month ends, didn’t offer a word about President Obama’s responsibility for the poor economy.

Deep in it, however, reporter Eli Saslow undermined his case when he sympathetically cited “a series of exhausting, fractional decisions” a couple with two toddlers face over having to choose between food “or the $75 they owed the tattoo parlor.”

At the Washington Post's Post Politics blog on Monday, Juliet Eilperin revealed that the White House has notified participants invited to the April 1 Easter Egg Roll that the event "is subject to cancellation due to funding uncertainty surrounding the Executive Office of the President and other federal agencies."

Eilperin only considered the White House's latest obvious example of "no petty and partisan gesture left behind" a partisan matter when a Republican who hasn't held political office for 15 years objected (bolds are mine):

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its 2013 pity party -- er, annual report -- on the State of the News Media (home page; full overview).

Two things struck me in my initial scan-through: First, the whining about newsroom cutbacks, which are largely related to pervasive bias and misplaced priorities; second, the characterization of newsmakers' improved ability to take their cases directly to the public "without any filter by the traditional media" as some kind of automatically negative trend.

Sally Quinn sure has a low opinion of the Catholic Church for someone that edits the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog.

Having claimed last week on CBS's Face the Nation that "so many priests are gay," Quinn this Sunday on CNN's Reliable Sources said the lack of media vetting and background checks of Cardinals meant Pope Francis "could possibly have been involved in a scandal" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Scott Prouty is the man behind the now infamous “47 percent” video that the media hyped to bring down Mitt Romney’s presidential bid.  It’s unbearably stale news at this point, but MSNBC’s Ed Schultz found a fresh hook for resurrecting it recently on his soon-to-be-defunct weeknight program. Prouty insisted that Romney’s invitation to speak at CPAC prompted him to come out of hiding and in the Schultz interview, he insisted he was not really that political a guy when he tended bar at a Romney fundraiser last year, when he surreptitiously recorded the video.

But Schultz, who owns a Canadian fishing lodge, apparently let Prouty on air to tell a fish tale. Today's Washington Post highlighted information in Prouty's background that seems to offer another explanation for why Prouty never came out in the open during the campaign, including evidence from social media postings that he is a committed liberal Democrat.

Back in February, I noted the Washington Post’s egregious omission of Senate Democrats as a category in a poll gauging the blame game if sequestration went into effect.  Sequestration was an initiative spearheaded by the Obama White House, which is part of the story that has many on the left ripping liberal journalism icon Bob Woodward for reporting.  Well, what do you know, in a new poll, the Post once again decided to leave the Democratic-run Senate off the hook, failing to ask respondents what they think about Senate Dems' handling of economic policy.

This is incredibly odd as it’s been way over 1,000 days since the Senate has presented, much less acted on a budget, something the liberal media would have ceaselessly hammered Republicans for had they been in control of the upper chamber of the U.S. Congress and done the same.

When liberals and their media allies have an agenda to push, they’ll use any tool at hand. The left often rails against the presence of religion in civic life, mocking conservative Christians as “Taliban” agitating for theocracy. But other times, they find faith to be a handy weapon to bludgeon conservatives. And they’ll go so far as to reinterpret and rewrite the Bible to justify any liberal cause, no matter how outrageous. 

In 2010, MSNBC anchor Melissa Harris-Perry summed up this strategy in her call for “re-imagining the Bible as a tool of progressive social change.” Huffington Post contributor Mike Lux embraced Harris-Perry’s advice, writing that the Bible embodies “all kinds” of “liberal, lefty, progressive values.”

Our left-wing media’s somber, mourning coverage of Venezuelan despot Hugo Chavez once again demonstrates the double standard journalists reserve for dictators.

Seven years ago, the left’s greatest South American hate object, Augusto Pinochet, passed away. Never mind how he used free-market reforms to modernize Chile. Never mind that after 15 years of rule, he allowed a national plebiscite to vote against him, and he stepped down peacefully. The left-wing outrage pulsed on the front pages.

CBS’s Bob Schieffer was clearly uncomfortable Sunday when two of his perilously liberal guests claimed there are many gay priests.

At the end of a Face the Nation discussion about the pending selection of a new Pope, Schieffer pushed back when the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn brought up homosexuality in the priesthood, and then he cut quickly to a commercial when Vanity Fair’s Carl Bernstein supported her contention (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The front page of Saturday's Washington Post took the publicity stunt of shutting down White House tours and spun it as an educational event. The headline was “In canceled White House tours, a civics lesson: Disappointed tourists help administration show sequester’s pain.” Inside the paper, the headline was “Worthless tickets drive home government’s dysfunction.” Ahem, the tickets are free even when they are honored.

The online headline was even worse: "With canceled tours, White House teaching how democracy works." Reporter David Nakamura blamed not Obama but the "dysfunctional state of the union":

One has to hope that Mr. Jack Crawford of Silver Spring, Md., is pulling some sort of prank on the Washington Post -- as Rush Limbaugh would say demonstrating absurdity by being absurd -- because if he's serious, his 42-word March 9 letter-to-the-editor is the most overwrought missive I've ever read in a serious major newspaper.

Published along with two other letters about the Post's "Hyping the sequester's drama," in the Saturday paper's "Free for All" mail bag feature, Crawford expressed his "hope" that the Post "will publish the pictures of all the people who lose their jobs due to the sequester" much like the paper "did with the soldiers who died in Iraq." "Martyrs should be held up for public approval of their honor," he concluded. [see screen capture below]

The anti-gun media will do anything in their power to undermine and discredit the National Rifle Association.

Doing its part Tuesday was the Washington Post with an article that wrongly accused the National Shooting Sports Foundation of breaking ranks with the NRA on background checks:

President Obama's sequester-related press briefing on March 1 contained the usual fibs. Examples include but are certainly not limited to the following: "We've already cut $2.5 trillion in our deficit," when the entire amount involved is something which might happen in the future; his claim that his State of the Union laundry list "is the agenda that the American people voted for," when many of the items involved were never mentioned during the 2012 campaign; and that the sequester is "happening because of a choice that Republicans in Congress have made," despite the fact that his advisers with his personal approval originated the idea in 2011 and the reality that he was under no compulsion when he signed the bill setting it in place last week.

Since then, while the establishment press has largely ignored it, the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler has twice honed in on a relatively small but clearly refutable statement Obama uttered that day: "Starting tomorrow, everybody here, all the folks who are cleaning the floors at the Capitol ... they're going to have less pay. The janitors, the security guards, they just got a pay cut, and they've got to figure out how to manage that. That’s real." No it's not.

The Washington Post editorial board today endorsed a plastic bag tax being considered in the Maryland General Assembly, insisting that the 5-cent excise tax will reduce plastic bag litter which clogs the state's streams and raise some "$7.3 million in revenue, a quarter of which would be retained by retail establishments like grocery stores." "It's a sensible measure that will help the environment -- if lawmakers have the spine to stand up to special interests," the paper huffed in its concluding line.

But what the Post failed to mention is that the bill, SB 576 -- entitled the Community Cleanup and Greening Act of 2013 -- specifically EXEMPTS plastic bags used to wrap newspapers, an exemption which obviously favors the Washington Post company:

The Washington Post decided to dump its ombudsman or reader’s advocate position after Patrick Pexton’s two-year contract ended. The position is “independent,” but all too often, the hiring media outlet gets every benefit of the doubt. Pexton has defended some incredibly shameless hit pieces, including the Rick Perry “Niggerhead”-on-a-rock story and the Mitt Romney “haircut bully” episode of 1965. 

Nevertheless, on March 1, NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos decried the Post decision as leading to a greater decline in media credibility. In the midst of this however, he attacked media watchdogs as a class as silly, uninformed nitpickers:

What's the point of the Washington Post retaining a conservative blogger when the paper's editors will opt to highlight her posts critiquing other conservatives rather than printing ones critical of the president and his lapdog lackeys in the press? Once again the Washington Post's op-ed page editors chose to excerpt a Jennifer Rubin blog post critical of conservatives rather than one tough on Barack Obama and the liberal media.

In her 8-paragraph March 4 item headlined "Talking truth to CPAC" -- condensed from a 14-paragraph blog post by the same title published online on March 3--  Rubin criticized the conservative gathering as "creatures of the 1980s, when our problems, our country and the world were different." "Younger conservatives have to take the movement into their own hands, refurbish it, revitalize it, cast off what is not relevant and persuade others to join the movement," if American political conservatism is to survive, Rubin concluded. Yet an hour earlier on Sunday, Rubin had published to the Post website a 15-paragraph item headlined, "Will anyone police this White House?" wherein the conservative blogger argued that (emphasis mine):

The Washington Post really hates the Catholic Church. See the top of Saturday’s Style section, which spotlights a group of “superprogressive” feminists and lesbians with boyish haircuts playing a board game critical of the papal election process. It's a "womyn's conclave" in oh-so-leftish Mount Rainier, Maryland, complete with a demand for "pink smoke." 

The end of the story by Monica Hesse highlights how they all look forward to the deconstruction of the Vatican and the scattering of the Catholic hierarchy to install Pope Dorothy I:

Reacting to the contentious exchange between the Obama White House and the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, on Friday's NBC Today, Meet the Press moderator David Gregory saw the conflict as part of a "larger issue": "...the President does not particularly like the Washington press corps. And I think that feeling is mutual in a lot of respects....there's not a great relationship between that Washington establishment and the President." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Gregory began by explaining: "All administrations push back hard, especially when they're dealing with a high-octane reporter and a top-notch reporter like Bob Woodward....and that's not a tension that's bad, okay? People should want that out of a press corps..." He then sympathized with White House: "...a lot of the President's advisers are frustrated that they feel they don't get the credit they deserve for the willingness to compromise they see on the President's end, that they do not see reciprocated on the part of Republicans."

In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post's Bob Woodward on Friday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer belittled the veteran journalist for daring to reveal a contentious exchange with White House adviser Gene Sperling: "I'm a little surprised you've gone public with this. I mean, these kinds of high-energy, high-octane, high-emotion conversations and debates happen all the time between government officials and the people who cover them. You've felt the heat before. Why did you go public with this one?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

The implied threat from the White House to Bob Woodward has thrown the liberal media for a loop. On Wednesday night, Politico published a fawning interview with Woodward. Writers Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei gushed over the "calm, instantly recognizable voice" of the journalist. On Wednesday, the Washington Post, which Woodward famously works for, mocked the Politico piece as nothing different than "fan fiction."

The Politico authors thrilled over being in the same room as Woodward. Allen and VandeHei's first paragraph raved, "Woodward [talked to] us in an hourlong interview yesterday around the Georgetown dining room table where so many generations of Washington’s powerful have spilled their secrets." A simple act of reading an e-mail became: "Digging into one of his famous folders, Woodward said the tirade was followed by a page-long email from the aide."

In a 19-paragraph story today, Washington Post staff writer Paul Farhi took a look at how various newspapers around the country are backing away from their initial requests for public records of gun owners. "For the third time in as many months, a newspaper has faced an angry backlash, including threats of violence, after it sought government data on local gun permit holders," Farhi noted. "In the two most recent instances, the newspapers rescinded requests for the documents amid the outcry, with one issuing an abject apology to its readers and the local sheriff for daring to seek the information in the first place," he griped.

In a time when the print newspaper is an endangered species, you'd think Farhi might present the story with the angle being how liberal papers are shooting themselves in the feet with stunts that harm their advertising revenue and subscription base. But no, the thrust of Farhi's piece is how newspapers are cowering away from doing their job. To make this point, Farhi turned to journalism professor Geneva Overholser, who perhaps is most infamous for her call eight years ago for newspapers to identify alleged rape victims (emphasis mine):

On Saturday, Washington Post reporters Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane fretted, with the help of several leftists they quoted, that sequestration might not cause enough pain. Given that the so-called "cuts" under discussion are really "reductions in projected spending growth," that is a legitimate fear if your perspective is that government shouldn't ever shrink under any circumstances.

Rush Limbaugh was correct on Tuesday when he noted that the Post let the "sky is falling" mask slip in it report. Several paragraphs, followed by a bit of Rush's reaction, follow the jump.

Remember when Washington Post In The Loop columnist Al Kamen launched another frivolous, liberal pandering contest for participants to name Hillary Clinton’s memoir to make things “a little easier” for her?  Kamen is known for his inside the Beltway commentary on politics within Washington, which probably explains why bureaucrats love him. Well, after a strenuous vetting process, the winners are in, and it’s full of liberal boot-lickers, pro-Obama journalists, and former staffers of Joe Biden.

The top three that were the most interesting were from Alfred Friendly, Jr., a former reporter for Newsweek and the New York Times, who suggested Hard Times, Soft Power as his title for Hillary’s memoir.  Does anyone else feel that the name sounds like a title suitable for the Adults Only section of the Clinton Presidential Library bookstore?