Wil Haygood

Headline wording choice can set the tone for liberal bias, and a November 18 Washington Post Style front-pager is a classic example.

Profiling Pentecostal preacher Bishop Harry Jackson, the Post titled staffer Wil Haygood's story "Seeking to put asunder," an obvious allusion to Jesus's declaration about the holy nature of matrimony (Matthew 19:4-6 KJV):

And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made [them] at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

Of course, that scriptural passage succinctly illustrates Jackson's point: Christian doctrine regarding marriage is that "from the beginning" God's design was one man and one woman in a "one flesh" union, but the effect of the headline's allusion is the same. The paper is portraying Jackson as a man who aims to "put asunder" loving, committed gay couples who are "married."

Wil Haygood of The Washington Post had some fun at Republican Gov. Mark Sanford’s expense in Wednesday’s Style section, insisting that Sanford was a laughingstock, a man who went missing because he was strange and unpopular for resisting the appeal of the Obama "stimulus." Haygood began:

After all those weird stares, after he fought against stimulus money meant to help his fellow South Carolinians who've lost jobs at an astounding rate, after the blitzkrieg of complaints from Democrats, no one had to tell Gov. Mark Sanford to take a hike.

He did it on his own.

Haygood even compared the South Carolina governor’s press aide to a Soviet stooge:

He'd dropped his security detail like a bag of stale potato chips over at reelection headquarters. He'd told his press spokesman to keep it all on the hush-hush, and the spokesman clammed up like a Kremlin operative.

"It's not unusual for him to take a few days off to recharge his batteries," Joel Sawyer, the Republican governor's spokesman, finally explained yesterday.

Sunday’s Obama-commemorating special edition of The Washington Post Magazine featured a goopy essay by Style section writer Wil Haygood, spread preciously across many pages of evocative hope-and-change photographs, culminating implausibly in an image of a supposedly psychic two-year-old:

So here, 10 days before the election, stands a boy, D'Andre Little, of Las Vegas. His mom hovers nearby. Maybe that thumb poking out is the thumb he sucks in the middle of the night. He's only 2, but he looks as if he knows something important is happening. He rests a tired arm on the poster-board image of the politician who stands before him. Not just another politician -- but the man who this week will become the 44th president of the United States. The very first who looks like him.

A two-year-old boy often isn’t even toilet-trained yet, but the Post has him contemplating the historic wonder of Obama. Haygood insisted "Obama stirred the bones of the dead -- of Frederick Douglass and Abe Lincoln and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks and the young preacher from Georgia [Martin Luther King] and the four little Birmingham girls and JFK and LBJ and A. Philip Randolph."