William Wan

In a 41-paragraph front-pager today, the Washington Post's William Wan looks at how the "New pope will be challenged by strained ties with China." "A reset is possible as both sides introduce new leadership," added a subheadline. The website version had a wildly different headline, "For China's Catholics, new pope brings hope."

Throughout his article, Wan  used language that suggested that the Vatican and the Communist Chinese dictatorship were on the same moral plane (emphases mine):

Krista Gesaman of Newsweek.com's Gaggle blog could have saved herself from the indignity of making the absurd claim that young women were "missing" from protests marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade by merely searching through the past coverage of the March for Life by the Washington Post, Newsweek's sister publication. In past years, the Post has highlighted the "youthful throng," the "large turnout of young people," and has quoted from teenagers participating at the annual pro-life March.

My colleague Ken Shepherd noted Gesaman's beyond faulty conclusion on Friday, and highlighted a recent Marist poll that indicated that "58 percent of persons aged 18-29 view abortion as 'morally wrong.'" Members of this age were all born after the 1973 Roe decision by the Supreme Court, so it's not that surprising of a statistic. He also underlined how "hundreds if not thousands of busloads teeming with teenagers and college students, many of them young women, descend on the nation's capital for the annual March for Life."

The Washington Post touts a Jeremiah Wright article on its front page today, so readers are instructed to turn to the Metro section. The headline there reads "Reverend's Words Stir Debate on His Creed." Only the reporters never quoted a single word of Wright's. What kind of Stupid Reporter Trick is that? So what readers get is fulmination over the reaction to Wright's words, but no idea of what those words were. The Post also used the words "liberation theology" almost always without quotes, even when citing its cousin, the Latin American Marxist variety. William Wan and Hamil Harris began:

Bobby Henry was angry when he first saw the now-famous snippets of sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. playing over and over on television. He considered the uproar over Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor an attack on a man of faith and the black church.

But he also wondered: Who is Wright, and what is the religious movement, known as black liberation theology, that shaped his ministry?