Thomas Lang of CJR Campaign Desk watches the Washington Post's editors take another dive:
CJR Campaign Desk: Archives: Glenn Kessler['s piece]... printed under the section head "For the Record," does an excellent job of fact-checking Giuliani's misstatements. [But] the Post undermines its own story's influence with a tepid lead and obscure placement.... Kessler examines Giuliani's attempts to mislead the audience on Kerry's stance on Israel's security fence... statements about foreign leaders, and on his status as an anti-war candidate.
Then he undersells his own story with an understated lead that declares only that Giuliani's paraphrases "often lacked context." A more effective approach would have been for an editor to hijack the subhead above the article -- "Meaning of Democrat's Comments and What's Being Cited Often Don't Match" -- and convert it, word for word, into the lead. The Post further undercut the influence of Kessler's story by burying it on page A22. (Yesterday, The Post dedicated two front page stories, in part, to Giuliani's speech -- and one of those included one of the misstatements critiqued a day late by Kessler.)"
And Thomas: only the children of Richard Nixon call them "misstatements": they're acts of deliberate mendacity, and you know it. Don't "undersell" your own story.
Posted by DeLong at September 1, 2004 07:59 PM | TrackBackWhat did the WaPo claim to have learned from its pre-iraq war coverage? That it was mistaken to bury important stories deep inside the paper?
I see that Len Downie sure took that lesson to heart. What a pissant.
Posted by: howard at September 1, 2004 09:47 PMdailyhowler.com gave a lot of treatment to that article.
Posted by: liberal at September 2, 2004 05:40 AM