Deborah Powell, the Washington Post's ombudsman, responded to criticism the Post had received for its article concerning Barack Obama's home mortgage.
The story that originated the criticism ran on page A3 of the July 2nd paper & was titled: "Obama Got Discount on Home Loan."
Where do I even begin with both the story and Howell's analysis of the story? Neither of the articles are exactly moving targets.
I won't even dissect the original WaPo article, which was a gutter-level smear through innuendo masquerading as investigative journalism.
Howell provides some context under which the original story was written, but gets to the meat of her analysis near the end of her critique. The circular logic is simply priceless.
In the second to last paragraph, Howell states:
Readers deserve to know everything pertinent The Post can find out about Barack Obama and John McCain's finances. In that context [the public deserving to know everything pertinent--brackets mine] and in the context of the home mortgage crisis, the story had news value.
Moving to the last paragraph, Howell concludes:
Still, the story had a negative cast to it. It also lacked the important context that other wealthy and savvy borrowers could have done as well under similar circumstances.
Let me attempt to wrap my noodle around those two statements. Think about those sentences for a moment.
I, the reader, as a member of the public, deserve to know everything pertinent about public officials getting sweetheart deals, specifically, I assume, because of the home mortgage crisis. In that context, Howell writes that "the story had news value".
Howell then pivots off of that statement to conclude that "other wealthy and savvy borrowers could have done as well under similar circumstances" [could have done just as well=no sweetheart deal].
So, unless I'm completely dense, Howell has just admitted that "the story had a negative cast to it" while maintaining its newsworthiness. Ostensibly, Howell admits that the condition that needed to exist [Sen. Obama receiving a sweetheart deal] for the story to be pertinent did not, in fact, exist.
This article was a hit piece.
I'm sure that it wasn't meant to be a hit piece. I'm sure that everyone involved had the best journalistic intentions, although I'm not sure what is worse: the smear by innuendo nature of the article or Howell's insistence that it was "newsworthy".
I was reading through a message board of a Jake Tapper story the other day concerning Sen. McCain and his Pittsburgh Steelers comments. There were multiple posts in which the posters trotted out all the greatest hits: "Rezko", Bitter-Gate", "Lapel Pin" & "Michelle not Proud of America" to diminish Sen. Obama.
However, now they had a new one--"Sweetheart Deal". Short. Easy to understand. Encapsulating multiple problems and themes into one word.
You can't put the genie back into the bottle now, WaPo [not that you're even trying]. Howell should be ashamed of this story and the implications it has for the quality of journalism at WaPo in that it was able to make it to press. This story should have been killed.
And it's, frankly, the type of hit-piece that someone needs to lose their job over. And people wonder why readers are abandoning newspapers in droves.
VOTE. VOLUNTEER. DONATE.
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