CJR: The WaPo Keeps on Giving

Campaign Desk

The WaPo Keeps on Giving

But isn’t making much sense

By Paul McLeary Wed 5 Dec 2007 01:20 PM

I come not to defend CJR against the Washington Post’s Assistant Managing Editor Bill Hamilton. I come to criticize further. In the Politico today, Hamilton struck back at us for taking WaPo reporter Perry Bacon Jr. to task for penning the shoddy “Obama Muslim rumor” story last week.

Admittedly I used some, shall we say, strident language in deconstructing Bacon’s piece, but take some comfort in the fact that people are still talking about how poorly done that story was. Must mean there’s something to the criticism, no? But Hamilton doesn’t see it that way, telling the Politico’s Michael Calderone that for a “journalism review to adapt the language of the most extreme blogs totally discredits it.”

It’s perfectly fine if he feels the need to push back, but what’s not fine is the tortured explanation he gives of his reasoning behind running the piece. I’m just going to let Hamilton hang himself here:

The paper’s intention, Hamilton said, was “to write a story about the kind of rumors that are out there,” and added that “saying something is a rumor is not saying it’s true.”

“We didn’t say it was a false rumor,” Hamilton added. “To me, a rumor is not true.”

With reasoning like that at the top of the editorial food chain, it looks like our job is going to be done for us this campaign season.

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Comments

aaskolnick

Sun 9 Dec 2007 02:01 PM

Just how stupid does Washington Post’s assistant managing editor think we readers are?

“We didn’t say it was a false rumor,” [Bill] Hamilton added. “To me, a rumor is not true.”

That’s like saying, “To me, war is peace, ignorance is strength, and up is down.” Hamilton is resorting to Orwellian “newspeak” to defend right-wing trash journalism.

Is it too much to expect that the Washington Post should employ an assistant managing editor who 1) knows to use dictionary definitions, not his own; 2) understands what is and is not “news”; 3) has a modicum of journalistic integrity; and 4) won’t mock readers with such twisted-English excuses for sleazy journalism?

According to all the dictionaries I could find, “rumor” does not mean “not true.” It means an “unsubstantiated” and usually “unattributed” statement. Rumors may be true, partially true, or completely false.

(BTW, as long as we’re trafficking in rumors, I heard that Bill Hamilton once passed a college English course.)

It’s outrageous that WP’s assistant managing editor would try to justify his paper’s “swift-boating” of Sen. Obama with such blatant doubletalk. Perhaps the publisher should consider changing the paper’s name to “The Oceania Post,” to better reflect its role as defender of the "Perpetual War Party" through newspeak.