Clumsy Coverage by the Washington Post

That there is bias in media coverage is almost a axiomatic, regardless of one's political perspective. By definition, writing or broadcasting the news means making value judgments as to what issues are important and relevant enough to claim scarce coverage resources. These decisions rely on value judgments, informed by political perspective. This sort of bias is sometimes referred to as "bias by agenda." The potential for bias by agenda is the reason that news rooms ought to have real diversity, a diversity of viewpoint.

Bias by agenda is hard to guard against, but incompetent or slanted coverage of any story, once chosen is inexcusable and one of the reasons there has been a flight from conventional news sources, the major papers and networks, toward the Internet and various alternative cable news networks.

Although the Washington Post has, and would probably concede in a moment of candor, a bias of agenda that leans to the Left, they are typically carefully balanced and fair within a story. Unfortunately, they have been guilty of such conspicuous coverage errors recently, that it is difficult to blame it on inadvertence or incompetence.

The first example concerns the confirmation hearings of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton has been harshly, sarcastically, and even undiplomatically critical of the UN. Indeed, Bolton has been so critical that many Democrats would like to prevent President George Bush's nominee from becoming the UN ambassador. Given the general unpopularity of the UN and the recent UN scandal involving billions of dollars in the UN-managed Oil-for-Food Program, many Americans might just believe that the UN ought to be sharply criticized. This makes it politically inconvenient for Democrats to attack Bolton on the merits of his positions, so instead there is a frantic effort to seek out character issues that might disqualify Bolton.

The Democrats found an issue in one Melody Townsel who had a decade-old dispute with Bolton about a project in Kyrgyzstan. For the Washington Post to report the charge on April 20, 2005 was entirely appropriate. However, they neglected to mention that Ms. Townsel is an anti-Bush partisan who founded the Dallas-chapter of "Mothers Against Bush." This does not make her charges necessarily false, but Washington Post readers were entitled to know Townsel's background as part of their overall assessment of the credibility of her story. This was not a small oversight, it was a key neglected fact. It was not until Howard Kurtz cited a National Review passage about Townsel that the Post's dedicated readers were made aware of Townsel's partisanship. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times also failed to mention Townsel's partisan affiliation, but one had come to expect more from the Washington Post.

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