Washington Post Ombud: Paper Botched Obama Muslim Piece
December 8, 2007 -- 10:55 AM EST // //
As promised, Washington Post Ombud Deborah Howell has finally weighed in on the controversy surrounding the recent WaPo piece that front-paged the Obama Muslim rumors without declaring them false. Her conclusion, in essence, was that the paper made a hash of things:
My problems with the story by National Desk political reporter Perry Bacon Jr. and the headline ("Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him") were that Obama's connections to Islam are slender at best; that the rumors were old; and that convincing evidence of their falsity wasn't included in the story...Score one for the rabble, I suppose. The question now, though, is: What will WaPo's editors -- and others in our political media -- end up taking away from this episode?The story also brought up a discredited Jan. 16 story in Insight magazine, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church and owner of the Washington Times. The Insight story said that Obama had gone to a madrassa, an Islamic religious school, as a child. CNN, ABC-TV and the Associated Press went to the school and reported that it was not a religious school but a public school. Bacon's story should have noted that information...
Another problem: Bacon's story also picked up a quote labeling Obama a Muslim from the Snopes.com Web site, which knocks down Internet rumors, but it didn't mention the investigation that found the rumor to be false.
Howell noted in her piece that there was no deliberate "smear job" intended towards Obama, as many readers alleged. And the editor of the piece, Bill Hamilton, had this to say about the whole affair: "Reasonable people can disagree on this. But the people I have heard from are not reasonable. What I find especially disheartening is the idea that our motives are simply assumed to have been malicious."
Look, let's not let a bunch of nasty emails distract us from the true nature of what really happened here. If people got a bit bent out of shape, it's because the piece seemed to capture a lot about what's wrong with the way journalism is practiced today. The real reason this episode touched such a nerve wasn't just about this one article. It triggered people's pent-up frustration with the larger failings of political journalism-as-usual.
It's really not too much of a stretch to say that the traditional media's mass and sometimes willful refusal to label falsehoods what they are -- false -- was largely responsible for bringing us the Bush era. The story's been told too often to rehash here, but there's no longer any real doubt that this press failing is one of the primary reasons George Bush was able to prevail in the 2000 and 2004 elections. When people read pieces like the Obama Muslim one, they quite properly worry that, you know, the same thing is well on its way to happening again. And this puts them on edge a bit.
Do some people overreact? No question -- after all, there's a lot to be pissed off about. But when editors complain about people sending them mean emails presuming bad motives on their part, they're just ducking the real issue here, which is one of execution. This isn't complicated: If something is false, say so clearly and directly -- and provide the necessary info to contradict it. No more euphemisms. No more timidity. No more averting your eyes when one side is lying. Tell your readers the truth. That's all there is to it.
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