Could We Just Bury the Washington Post Now?
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? I mean, it hasn't even crashed and burned. It's dead and rotted: a source of smell and disease.
Matthew Yglesias
Matthew Yglesias: Fred Hiatt Wants The Washington Post to Go Out of Business: FWhat other explanation could there be for deciding that he wants to run an op-ed by Sarah Palin about how Obama should “boycott” the Copenhagen conference? And, no, that’s not a link to the op-ed. That’s a link to a post at The Awl excerpting an email about the op-ed that the Post’s PR team sent out. Strangely it doesn’t read “we don’t consider ourselves to be in the business of providing reliable information to our readers.”
By contrast, the Financial Times has an interesting op-ed about what Copenhagen negotiators could learn from the Montreal Protocol that reduced use of CFCs to prevent the opening of a dangerous hole in the ozone layer. Gray, one notes, is an honest-to-God Republican—White House counsel in George HW Bush’s administration, Ambassador to the European Union under George W Bush. But he’s a well-informed person with a background in relevant issues and a desire to present good-faith arguments to the public.
Jeremy Schulman:
Wash. Post publishes falsehood-laden Palin op-ed that is contradicted by scientists, temperature data, and ... the Post itself: The Washington Post has published an op-ed by Sarah Palin.... [W]hat was Jones talking about? The Washington Post has actually explained it on its news pages. In a December 5 Post article, David A. Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin reported that Jones "wrote a colleague that he would 'hide' a problem with data from Siberian tree rings with more accurate local air temperature measurements." In other words, four days after two Washington Post science reporters explained that Jones was saying that he replaced problematic tree ring data with "more accurate" data from actual temperature measurements, the Post op-ed page allows Palin to claim that Jones was somehow concealing a decline in temperatures that never actually existed...
Duncan Black:
What's It For?: I can never quite get a handle on just what the Washington Post people - its publishers, Fred Hiatt, etc... - think that it's for? Is it about providing a product people want to buy/advertisers want to advertise in? It is about informing readers, giving them factual information and analysis they want? Are these missions in conflict or do they coincide? And why does it take bloggers to point out how absurd they are? Where are all the journalists who spend their days bitching about bloggers? Don't they care that the product they're defending is basically s---?
