Talk about burying a lede. Some 1,100 words into his 1,400-word piece (“‘Substantive’ Press Is Taken for a Spin”) in today’s Washington Post, uber-critic Howie Kurtz writes, “While some journalists say privately they are censoring their comments about Palin to avoid looking like they’re piling on, pundits on the right are jumping ship.”
The news here is even buried within its own sentence. Again, just to be clear: some journalists say privately they are censoring their comments about Palin to avoid looking like they’re piling on.
While Kurtz’s article is chock full of great quotes from media members and the people who spin them–including, as Liz noted, this baffling one-liner from Andrea Mitchell–his revelation about self-censorship, it seems, should be just a tad higher in his story. As in, at the very top. Because, you know: Journalists censoring themselves for fear of appearing to bully Sarah Palin? Seriously? Um, paging Campbell Brown…
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.