Ann Gerhart

"Birth control has ­become a surprise ­obsession among the GOP presidential can­didates this year."

That's the misleading teaser headline on page A1 of the February 21 Washington Post. After all, it was a liberal Democratic Congress that passed and a liberal Democratic president who is enforcing provisions of ObamaCare that will force religious institutions to provide contraceptive coverage in insurance plans, even if doing so violates religious conscience. Yet to the liberal media, it's social conservatives who are waging "culture wars."

Borrowing a line from one of her Harvard colleagues, the Washington Post entitled its June 10 front-page profile of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, "Her work is her life is her work."*

But the 60-paragraph story by staff writers Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker shed barely any light on the judicial philosophy that Kagan's life work demonstrates. Instead, Gerhart and Rucker presented a gauzy profile that rehashed the usual trivia -- Kagan loves poker and the opera -- while painting Kagan as a workaholic who still has time to lend an ear or a shoulder to cry on to friends in distress:

She has arrived at the age of 50 in a blaze of accomplishment. But her achievements can obscure how relatively narrow her world has been. 

First Lady Laura Bush is "settling scores" in her new memoir, reported Washington Post writer Ann Gerhart on Thursday, and several reporters from the New York Times and The Washington Post are called out:

The New York Times' Jason DeParle interviewed her "in a tone that was adversarial and more than a touch offensive." [DeParle is the Times reporter whose wife currently works for Obama.]

Jim VandeHei, then at The Washington Post, appalled her in Egypt when, during a presentation by the director of the Giza pyramid excavation project, he "elbowed his way to the front of the press pool, climbed onto the pyramid plateau and began shouting out questions" about Egyptian politics.

President Obama’s Saturday night declaration that " I will end ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’" at a fundraising dinner for the gay-left Human Rights Campaign seems like a front-page story. But not to the Washington Post. Instead, they put pensions, Pakistan, a profile of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, and a Bush-era DNA-testing policy on the front page.

And at the top left: an attack on conservative blogger Michelle Malkin leading a charge of incivility that’s "sour, angry, even dangerous."

The headline was "In Today’s Viral World, Who Keeps a Civil Tongue?" Is the Post civil? They connected Malkin and her fans with anti-Semitic radio host Father Charles Coughlin, railing against Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Noting how the Palmetto State "has a history of rowdy politics" and that Rep. Joe Wilson (R) has made himself  "the latest in a legendary line of South Carolina politicians who appeared to revel in renegade behavior,"  the Washington Post's Philip Rucker and Ann Gerhart turned to South Carolina Democratic operatives Don and Carol Fowler to smear Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) in their September 11 front-pager entitled "The Gentlemen From South Carolina."

Rucker and Gerhart turned to the husband-wife couple -- he was a Clinton era DNC chairman and she is the current South Carolina state Democratic chairwoman -- to practically tag-team in slamming Wilson. Rucker and Gerhart also acknowledged some Palmetto Democrats' brushes with political infamy before cuing up Don Fowler to quip that he thinks "it is something in the water."

Yet nowhere in their story did Rucker and Gerhart note Don Fowler's gaffe from August 2008, when, on a flight from the Democratic Convention, he made an inappropriate joke involving hurricane victims in New Orleans (video embedded above at right):