20 November 2008 @ 8:43AM >> One week after admitting that the Washington Post’s election coverage showed a “tilt” that favored Barack Obama, the paper’s ombudsman discussed the importance of intellectual diversity in the newsroom:

Thousands of conservatives and even some moderates have complained during my more than three-year term that The Post is too liberal; many have stopped subscribing, including more than 900 in the past four weeks.

It pains me to see lost subscribers and revenue, especially when newspapers are shrinking. Conservative complaints can be wrong: The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.

But some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.

Journalists bristle at the thought of their coverage being viewed as unfair or unbalanced; they believe that their decisions are journalistically reasonable and that their politics do not affect how they cover and display stories.

Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said, “The perception of liberal bias is a problem by itself for the news media. It’s not okay to dismiss it. Conservatives who think the press is deliberately trying to help Democrats are wrong. But conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”

[...]

The opinion pages have strong conservative voices; the editorial board includes centrists and conservatives; and there were editorials critical of Obama. Yet opinion was still weighted toward Obama. It’s not hard to see why conservatives feel disrespected.

Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.

Rosenstiel said, “There should be more intellectual diversity among journalists. More conservatives in newsrooms will bring about better journalism. We need to be more vigilant and conscious in looking for bias. Our aims are pure, but our execution sometimes is not. Staff members should feel in their bones that unfairness will never be tolerated.”

Bob Steele, ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, thinks editors should be doing “ongoing content evaluation of candidates and issues to provide scrutiny on photos, stories, placement of stories and what are the weaknesses and strengths of the candidates.” He also recommends “prosecutorial editing” as one way to “minimize the ideological bias and beliefs that all journalists have. It would greatly reduce the news content being skewed by beliefs.”

The Post and other news media can work harder on eliminating even the perception of bias while never giving up the willingness to follow stories that will inevitably tick off some readers.

Intellectual diversity in the newsroom is essential to the quality of the media’s product. There need to be people involved in the reporting process who challenge the assumptions of the dominant thinking in the industry.

Today, it’s clear that isn’t the case, and that’s one of the reasons for the sorry financial state of the news business.

9 November 2008 @ 12:27PM >> Now that the hangovers from their post-election celebrations have begun to dissipate, members of the media can finally be honest about their coverage.

According to Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, her paper favored Obama:

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

[...]

But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

[...]

One gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission.

I guess it’s too much to ask for media honesty before an election.

2 June 2008 @ 8:29AM >> When a blue-blooded old media outlet like the Washington Post raises the possibility of victory in Iraq on its editorial pages, it’s news:

THERE’S BEEN a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks — which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war. While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained “special groups” that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is — of course — too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments — and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the “this-war-is-lost” caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

It is funny to see the editors say it’s “odd” that the stunning turnaround in Iraq isn’t getting more press coverage. If they think it’s under-reported, isn’t a rather simple solution to report it more? In fact, wouldn’t that be the only journalistically responsible thing to do?

After all, it’s not as though the Washington Post exists in a vacuum; if the paper decided to cover success in Iraq as vigorously as it covered failure, other media outlets would have a harder time continuing to peddle a storyline of defeat.

Eventually, politicians would even have to acknowledge the emerging reality. But as the Post notes, that might be problematic for certain candidates.

Perhaps that’s why these improvements aren’t being reported more.

Still, it’s refreshing to see the Post acknowledge the very real successes of the past year. Will other outlets follow suit?

13 December 2006 @ 7:18PM >> Some thoughts on the future of newspapers from The Atlantic Monthly:

[T]op reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper—especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists-like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

So what should newspapers do? They could stop printing. It may happen eventually, or perhaps newsprint will find a financially sustainable market among the elite and elderly (or perhaps it will have a nostalgic vogue not unlike that of, say, heirloom tomatoes), but that’s not what I’m getting at. The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.

That, I’d venture, is how you start rethinking the newspaper business. Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. To take but one example, Kelefa Sanneh is the pop-music critic for The New York Times. He is very likely the best music critic in the country, and certainly the best new Times music writer in years. Let’s say that Sanneh creates his own community around the music he likes. Or The Washington Post’s Dana Priest creates an interactive online universe around her intelligence reportage. With editorial oversight only for libel and factual accuracy, Sanneh or Priest are allowed to do whatever they want on their sites (while their mother ships pour their resources into marketing them). In Sanneh’s case, allow other people to write music reviews under the Times/Sanneh “brand.” In Priest’s case, turn the site into a clearinghouse for global intelligence information, rumors, conspiracy theories, and so forth (obligatory disclaimer: “The views of posters do not necessarily represent those of the Washington Post Company”). Go even further: incentivize the critics and reporters by allowing them to profit based on the popularity of their sites; make it worth their while to stick around.

[...]

Playing this logic out, the next task would be uniting the Sanneh or Priest site to the Times or Post whole. You could essentially self-syndicate, sending your regular Times or Post headlines to Sanneh’s and Priest’s sites, luring readers back to the mother ship while increasing the number of times each story is read. Indeed, the logic could be (and in some circles already is being) played out even further. What if you essentially exploded the central function of the newspaper and “microchunked” (to borrow a current term) the content, syndicating all of it to bloggers or other news sites in return for a share of any advertising revenue each site generates? The Associated Press has made this the centerpiece of its digital-age strategy: it recently signed a potentially breakthrough deal with Google, in which Google will pay the AP for access to its stories; and the AP has launched a broadband player that Web sites can use to access AP video content. Its content goes where the readers are, and the AP gets paid, no matter what. Remarkably, this most old-school of services is a lone bright spot in the MSM landscape. The AP’s revenues have increased from more than $593 million in 2003 to more than $654 million in 2005; its digital revenue grew at a rate of 66 percent from 2004 to 2006. Of course, the AP has always been a syndicator, so no conceptual leap of faith (indeed no leap whatsoever) was required to move the business from analog to digital.

4 December 2006 @ 12:27AM >> A study of how the media has been distoring war reporting since the September 11th attacks:

Convincingly and without resorting to partisan politics, [study author Jim A.] Kuypers strongly illustrates in eight chapters “how the press failed America in its coverage on the War on Terror.” In each comparison, Kuypers “detected massive bias on the part of the press.” In fact, Kuypers calls the mainstream news media an “anti-democratic institution” in the conclusion.

“What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,” said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president’s themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.”

5 October 2006 @ 9:47PM >> In response to my piece on Bob Woodward’s admission that higher-ups at the Washington Post claimed an “obligation” to publish State of Denial before the election, reader Matt S. e-mails:

I’m a regular reader and fan, but yesterday’s post titled “A Question for the Washington Post” was, in my opinion, far below your standard.

Setting aside Woodward’s politics, biases, and agendas, it seems perfectly compatible with standards of professional journalism that a journalist would aim to publish a story before an election if that story contained information relevant to the election.

Citizens are supposed to make informed decisions on Election day; it’s the role of a free press to help citizens become informed. I think it follows that citizens should be informed prior to making such consequential decisions.

I’m perfectly happy to read arguments that question the accuracy, veracity, or objectivity of Woodward’s reporting - I think there are legitimate questions there - but to suggest that there’s something wrong with publishing a relevant story before an election is silly.

Matt,

Of course a more informed electorate is preferable. But the subject of Woodward’s book is not on the ballot in this election, which is why I find it curious.

The book discusses the Bush Administration and reportedly casts the president in a harsh light. If President Bush were up for election, I would understand the civic obligation felt by journalists to get the facts out—however they perceive them—so that voters could make up their minds. But since the voters will not get to pull the lever for or against the president, I’d figure the folks at the Post would be relatively neutral about whether the book launched in the home stretch of a midterm election that, unlike most, has the potential for both houses of Congress to switch party control.

Instead, there was a sense of importance placed on the timing. Woodward, the Post people felt, had a “real obligation” to make sure the book dropped before a specific date. Woodward acknowledged that he and the Post sat on these stories. He said he didn’t want “to make a splash” by reporting individual stories when they happened, but instead he wanted “to assemble the whole story,” which required waiting until the assembly was done. A fair argument, but usually, newspapers are in the business of telling us things when they happen, not months later when the political timing is right. Besides, isn’t waiting until six weeks before an election going to cause much more of a political splash than a story reported in, say, the spring of 2005?

I can’t claim to know Woodward’s motivation or that of the folks at the Post. But I do suspect that if he were given a chance rephrase his statement, he wouldn’t pass it up. I think it was an admission he didn’t intend to make.

Thanks for writing,
Evan

2 October 2006 @ 11:24PM >> The latest book critical of the Bush Administration is from Bob Woodward, the journalist whose work in the 1970s helped take down President Nixon. This morning, Woodward appeared on NBC’s Today show, where Matt Lauer asked about the timing of the book’s release. Editor and Publisher reports:

Lauer had challenged Woodward on the timing, since the charges in the book about the administration allegedly misleading the public on progress in the Iraq war are so significant. How could he hold that for a book? Why didn’t he get them published in his newspaper, The Washington Post, or shout them from a “mountaintop” instead of waiting to “make a splash” with them in a book?

Woodward replied that he had not waited “to make a splash, but to assemble the whole story,” and then go to the White House and Pentagon and CIA and ask, “What did you do?” He added: “Simon & Schuster and my bosses at the Washington Post said the only real obligation here is to tell it before the election.

“That’s what we’re doing. People can judge for themselves.”

I can understand why Simon & Schuster would want the book released in the weeks before the election; they’re publishers, and they want to profit from an atmosphere in which potential bookbuyers are already thinking about politics. Fair enough.

But why would the Washington Post want Woodward’s book published shortly before the election? Theoretically, the folks at the Post are journalists, which means that they should only care about reporting the story, not releasing it at a specific point in the election cycle. The fact that the Post felt Woodward had “an obligation” to publish before the election implies that the paper wanted to affect the election; if the reaction of the voters was of no concern to the Post, it really wouldn’t matter whether the book was released before or after the election.

President Bush isn’t on the ballot in this election, but conventional political calculus asserts that a book damaging to the president would also hurt the president’s party, especially in an election that’s historically dismal for the party occupying the White House. Did Bob Woodward accidentally admit that the folks at the Washington Post want the Republicans to fare poorly in the upcoming elections? Why else would they care when his book got published?

23 May 2006 @ 3:10AM >> First, let’s define “they.” For the purposes of this article, “they” refers to Jihadists: a radical subset of Muslims who believe it is their duty to kill anyone who refuses to abide by their religious law. Coincidentally, “they” are responsible for a disproportionate share of the terrorist attacks around the world, as un-politically-correct as this might be to recognize.

Now that we know who “they” are, who’s “us”? Even though the “us” that “they” hate pretty much amounts to all of Western society, I will take “us” to mean the United States, since in the eyes of many in the non-Western world, the U.S. symbolizes Western society. But as the ongoing terrorist attacks worldwide prove, people are grossly misinformed if they believe the United States is the only country the Jihadists wish to destroy. More >>

14 March 2006 @ 9:33AM >> The Washington Post profiles David Gregory, NBC’s White House correspondent:

After six years on the beat, Gregory is emerging as the Sam Donaldson of the Bush years, the outspoken, aggressive, smart-aleck correspondent serving as a symbol for conservatives who detest the press and liberals who want reporters to crusade against the White House.

It is true that Gregory has been aggressive—perhaps overly so and maybe even rude—but comparing him to Sam Donaldson? That’s just mean!

22 February 2006 @ 12:23AM >> Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is taking heat from the WashingtonPost.com ombudswoman Deborah Howell:

Dana Milbank can be controversial with readers. The Post reporter has his fans — and I can be one of them — but I think his appearance on MSNBC last week was a mistake in judgment.

Milbank wore hunting gear — an orange stocking cap and striped vest and gloves — on Keith Olbermann’s show Monday night and made several meant-to-be-humorous remarks about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident.

[...]

The mail was swift and sure. I got hundreds of e-mails, many prompted by conservative blogs. A number of readers asked the same question as Mark O’Brien of Mechanicsburg, Pa.: “Is Milbank an opinion columnist or a reporter?”

The answer isn’t simple. Milbank, a national political reporter, writes the frequent Washington Sketch column on Page 2 and also does the occasional news story. Editors here do not consider him an opinion columnist.

[...]

Washingtonpost.com, which is under different management than the print Post, lists Milbank as an opinion columnist. I think that’s right. Milbank said, “I realize there’s a fine line between making observational judgments and expressing an opinion.”

If Post editors insist he is not an opinion columnist, then Milbank ought to drop the funny hats and stay away from comedy shows.

[...]

It all comes down to what Stephen Stanford of Saltillo, Miss., wrote: “If you are going to keep using his work, how about labeling it as opinion and not news?”

Exactly.

Or, how about admitting that opinion sometimes sneaks into the writing of even the most earnest “objective reporter”? How about doing away with the labels “reporter” versus “columnist”?

This discussion goes to the very heart of the problems that plague the modern news media. Outlets insist that their “reporters” are objective, while “columnists” aren’t held to the same supposedly-stringent rules of objectivity. But what distinguishes a “reporter” from a “columnist”? If you look through many newspapers, you may have a hard time figuring out which is which. Even the Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com don’t seem to agree how to categorize someone like Milbank. If two sides of the same news organization can’t figure it out, how can they expect the reader to understand the distinction?

I don’t think Milbank’s the bad guy here. His situation is merely the result of the unrealistic set of rules and assumptions that govern the modern newsroom. Milbank’s just being Milbank. If you read him regularly, you see the same kind of snarky—dare I say blog-like—attitude in his writing that you see on display when he mocks the Vice President by donning day-glo hunting gear on a national news program.

So, maybe it’s time for the establishment media to rewrite its rules. The existing environment doesn’t seem to lead to a very good product, and it’s preventing people like Milbank from doing the sort of work that they so clearly ache to do.

A year ago, I posted my interview with Dana Milbank, to which I added this observation:

The problem [for the news media] is, if significant segments of the population think you’re biased, perception is what matters, not reality. In the establishment press, your credibility is locked up in portraying yourself as objective. Any perception of bias makes the claim of objectivity seem like a lie. If people think you’re lying about that, they might not believe you even when you’re giving them cold, hard facts.

Under the rules of the blogosphere, bias isn’t a problem. Everyone’s expected to have a bias, and it is our duty to broadcast that bias, because it helps readers understand when to view our claims with a little extra scrutiny.

As Mr. Milbank points out, just because you shun objectivity doesn’t mean you dismiss objective fact. Fact and opinion can be commingled without killing anybody, so long as your facts are facts. But for years, the establishment media has been promising us that what they say is fact. And for years, they’ve been letting us down. From the Dateline NBC’s bottle rockets under the gas tanks to Dan Rather’s bogus memos, from the newspaper circulation scandals to the admitted cover-up of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, Big Media doesn’t have much credibility left. So it’s a little hard to believe that all the people who’ve been cutting corners in the mainstream press for non-political reasons wouldn’t take similar liberties with the truth in their political coverage.

[...]

Objective reporting died because it requires objectivity at the individual level. But you see the world one way, I see it slightly differently, and frankly, I’m not so certain of myself that I’d stake my credibility on the world being exactly as I perceive it. If I say I’m an objective reporter, I’m claiming that I can distinguish between reality and my perception of it. I’m saying that I can tell you a story about an event significant enough to write about, and not a single word of what I say will be colored by my own thoughts on the topic. How can I make such a promise and honestly mean it?

Instead of requiring perfect objectivity from each individual, open source reporting allows distributed objectivity. I can post a message online, and if my bias goes overboard, someone else can point that out. The checks and balances are built-in, because rival bloggers have much more incentive to scrutinize their competitors than rival media outlets do. The establishment press club is too cozy. They can’t police themselves. When you’re living in a neighborhood of glass houses, nobody wants to be the first person to start a stone-throwing war. I’ve seen the blogosphere derided as a circle-jerk, but it’s more like a circular firing squad. In a good way. The bullets chip away the falsehoods, leaving truth.

[...]

If Dana Milbank freed himself from the bondage of the unattainable ideal of objectivity and joined the blogosphere, he could help drive the national discussion in a more direct way, and I bet he’d have more fun. He asked how the Post could work with bloggers. Well, he was kind enough to participate in this discussion, so in a way, he and the Post already are working with bloggers. But why must the blogosphere remain completely separate from the establishment media? Why not experiment with blending the best of both? If the Post wants to learn about the blogosphere, what better way than starting a blog? Unleash Dana Milbank! Give him a co-branded website with a separate domain name, and let him say what he wants to say outside the artificial constraints of objectivity. But back it up with the kind of world-class organization that only exists in the establishment press. Become a hybrid.

Join us, Mr. Milbank. I think you’d like it over here.

After being spanked for his latest stunt, I’ve got to think that this suggestion is looking a bit more enticing to him.

3 October 2005 @ 12:43PM >> In The Washington Post, Howard Kurtz quotes his colleague Marie Arana, who describes what life is like working for that newspaper:

The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. . . . We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I’ve been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.

7 April 2005 @ 8:55AM >> Turns out the mystery Schiavo memo came from a staffer of Republican Senator Mel Martinez. The staffer has resigned, as he should have, not only for his putrid politicization of the issue, but also because, according to some of the drafts I’ve seen online, he is an atrocious speller.

Still, as PowerLine points out, the news of the memo’s source does not absolve the media of charges that it reported the story erroneously. For example, Washington Post referred to the memo being “distributed to Republican senators by party leaders.” A staffer of a man who has not even been Senator for a quarter year does not a “party leader” make.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg quotes Senator Martinez denying knowledge of the memo prior to it being made public:

[Chris Wallace, Fox News]: Senator, how do you explain, then, these talking points, which have been circulated among Republican senators? And let’s put them up on the screen, so our viewers can see them.

[...]

Martinez: And I reject those. I’ve never seen them before today. And I’ll tell you, they’re not a part of what I think this case is about.

It may be possible that Senator Martinez’s staffer passed around a memo that he himself never saw. But is it likely? Looks like Mel’s got some splainin’ to do.

As with the much else in the Schiavo case, nobody seems to come out of this looking good.

31 March 2005 @ 5:30PM >> It’s a very brief mention, and he is a little confused over the name of this site, but Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post did mention this site in passing:

In the spate of blog attacks on the media, critics have featured such headlines as “GOP Slimed by Another Fake Memo?,” as a site called Evan’s Journal put it.

How does that saying go? Any publicity is good publicity as long as you spell my name right? Maybe that should be amended to: ...as long as you get my site right.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin responds to the Kurtz article, noting:

We still don’t know who wrote the memo. We still don’t know who distributed it. ABCNews.com still hasn’t retracted its unsubstantiated characterization of the memo as “GOP Talking Points.” ABC still has not acknowledged that Kate Snow misspoke. The Post still hasn’t acknowledged that it wrongly implied that the memo was written and/or distributed by Republicans.

28 March 2005 @ 7:21PM >> In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes reports on the latest Republican-bashing mystery memo promoted by the establishment press:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist never saw it. Neither did the Senate Republican whip, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The number three Republican in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, didn’t get a copy. Nor did the senator with the closest relationship with President Bush, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. And the senator with the familiar Republican last name, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, didn’t see it or read it. The same is true of Senator Mel Martinez, the rookie Republican from Florida.

Yet the infamous memo that argued Republicans stood to gain politically by saving the life of Terri Schiavo was characterized by ABC News as consisting of “GOP Talking Points.” True, a few paragraphs were of Republican origin. They had been lifted, word for word, from a Martinez press release outlining the provisions of his legislative proposal, “The Incapacitated Person’s Legal Protection Act.” This was the inoffensive part of the memo. The offensive part—it didn’t come from Martinez—left the strong impression that Republicans are callous and cynical in their attempt to save Schiavo’s life, ill-motivated in the extreme.

Despite the fact that nobody could authenticate the memo or determine its source, both ABC News and The Washington Post described it using language that implied it came from the Republican Party itself:

Supposedly the memo was distributed only to Republicans on the Senate floor. Ergo, it was a Republican document. ABC correspondent Linda Douglass first reported its existence on March 18, saying the network “has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators, explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case.” She mentioned the two offensive passages, and the memo was shown on the screen. The ABC website was explicit about the source of the memo: These were “GOP talking points on Terri Schiavo.” Two days later, the Washington Post referred to it as “an unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators.”

There wasn’t a hint in these reports the memo could have any other source but Republicans. Yet there was no evidence it had come from Republicans. It was unsigned and had no letterhead or date. Nothing indicated it came from the Republican leadership or the House or Senate campaign committee or from the Republican National Committee or even from a stray Republican staffer.

[...]

How did ABC and others get wind of the memo in the first place? It came from “Democratic aides,” according to the New York Times, who “said it had been distributed to Senate Republicans.” Not exactly a disinterested source.

How curious that such sloppy reporting just so happens to work against Republicans yet again. But it gives the Republicans an opportunity to strike back: simply author an “incriminating” but unsigned memo with no letterhead, get some GOP staffers to pass it out, claiming that it came from Democrats, and wait for the establishment media to report the “story.” Think you might be waiting a long time? Then I guess you understand the game by now.

Update: The memo’s author has come forward.

25 February 2005 >> Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank was kind enough to give some of his time for this interview with Brain Terminal. I solicited questions from the public, wrote some of my own, and assembled a list of 18 questions, which were then e-mailed to Mr. Milbank. His replies appear within. More >>

7 July 2004 @ 6:13PM >> Check out this quote from a recent Los Angeles Times article:

L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator for Iraq, left without even giving a final speech to the country — almost as if he were afraid to look in the eye the people he had ruled for more than a year.

Obviously, the second part of that quote is a bit of editorializing. But we’ll ignore the fact that the statement came in a “news” story and not an opinion piece. The greater transgression is the fact that the report is dead wrong. Bremer did deliver a farewell speech, and it was apparently quite well-received by at least some Iraqis.

In all fairness to the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post screwed up the story as well.

Napoleon once said, “Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.” It’s good advice for the conspiratorially-minded. But in the case of the traditional media, why does it always seem that the supposed incompetence carries with it a specific political message?