The Paper's Boy

I agree with Matt Taibbi about the Howie the Putz article on how the Washington Post whored for the Bush Administration on Iraq. It wasn't a brave reconsideration and acknowledgment of fault, it was a textbook case of ass-covering. As Taibbi puts it:

When the Post wasn't reassuring readers of its competence, it was offering excuses—lots of them. The list is really an extraordinary one. According to Kurtz's interview subjects, the Post was slow on Iraq because: a) Walter Pincus is a "cryptic" writer who isn't "storifyable"; b) there is limited space on the front page, and executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. likes to have health and education and Orioles coverage and other stuff there; c) the paper got a lot of depressing hate mail questioning its patriotism whenever it questioned the Bush administration; d) their intelligence sources wouldn't go on the record, while Bush and Powell were up there openly saying all this stuff; e) the paper had to rely on the administration because Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus had no "alternative sources of information," and particularly couldn't go to Iraq "without getting killed"; f) the paper, including Woodward, was duped by highly seductive intelligence-community "groupthink"; g) too many of the dissenting sources were retired from government or, even worse, not in government at all; h) stories on intelligence are "difficult to edit"; g) there was "a lot of information to digest"; h) the paper is "inevitably a mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power"; i) a flood of copy about the impending invasion kept skeptical coverage out [Note: This is my favorite. We're already covering the war, so it's too late to explain why we shouldn't go to war.]; and finally, j) none of it matters, because even if the Post had done a more thorough job, there would have been a war anyway.

I think the only one missing is Woodward's we didn't say there were no WMDs because we would have looked stupid if we were wrong.

The real explanations are much simpler. Those controlling the Post's coverage, from Donnie to Downie to Hiatt, were pro-Administration and pro-war, and slanted the paper's coverage accordingly. Woody Woodward was sucking up to the Administration to maintain access for his own lucrative ass-kissing books. Many of the Post's reporters -- such as Steno Sue -- reported (and still report) the Administration's line -- eagerly and uncritically, and are not called to account for their propaganda.

Of course, these troubling explanations aren't even floated in Howie's article. If the Putz even suggested them, his article would never see the light of day. And he knows it, like his job depends on it.

That the Post's coverage was so inaccurate and so slanted is not subject to dispute, so Howie's article wasn't necessary to point that out. It was simply an effort at damage control. So the Putz writes a story which shifts blame away from the paper (newspapering is hard) while refusing to blame either the paper or the Administration.

Look at it this way: The Putz is supposed to be a media critic. In this case, he's nominally critiquing his own paper. But the Putz's article quotes only one critic (Michael Massing), who is given three sentences to say that the Post did better than most, but was napping along with everyone else. The rest of the article is the Post's defenses -- which allows the Post to control, frame and distort the criticism of the paper's whoring. It's the equivalent of a trial where the alleged crime is captured on tape, but the defense gets to tell the jury what the law is and is the only one allowed to call witnesses.

Or look at it another way: One of the Post's contradictory defenses is that the paper had -- and published -- the information, it just failed to give it the prominence it deserved. But that claim negates the paper's other defenses, such as incompetence or the "difficulty of reporting," and conclusively establishes that the paper was whoring for Bush and his war.

Either way, the Putz hasn't restored any of the Post's lost credibility.