Crossposted on One Million Strong
Peter Baker, writing for the otherwise excellent Washington Post blog The Trail, declares that the blogosphere is overreacting and blames the medium, personalities in the blogosphere, the atmosphere in the country ––– basically anyone and everyone other than the Post. It's not us, it's the country, the blogosphere, the candidates, the mood of the times...
Outrage in the blogosphere is petty and manufactured, "stoked" by a tiny minority that just want to create division and ruin an honest reporter's day. After all, we spend our days plotting to demolish reasoned discourse.
Two furors stoked by the blogosphere over the last 24 hours neatly illustrate the changing political climate in the United States these days and underscore the depths of suspicion, anger and hostility out there as the country tries to pick a new leader[...]
In both cases, any legitimate criticism and sober-minded discussion of the issues raised get drowned out by the loudest, most vituperative voices. The net result is not dialogue, but a contest of outrage.
Apparently Baker would prefer to dismiss bloggers and reinforce negative stereotypes of the blogosphere instead of actually engaging with their complaints. Rule #1: Calling bloggers "angry" only makes them angry. Moreover, he doesn't seem to have bothered to read or noted the criticisms that he dismisses. (More on this later.)
But that's not what really bothers me about Baker's take. What bothers me is that he literally can not see, or lacks the imagination to see, what anyone could find so offensive about the Post article.
Imagine an article that saw fit to reprint deeply offensive or racist material, for example, asserting the inferiority of a group of people.
First, you can question whether reprinting this kind of material is ever justified. Why bother to detail and document in full for the general public a series of racist statements? What possible purpose could that serve? Why not just state that false and baseless accusations have been made? Especially when there is a sizable minority of Americans who might believe the accusations.
Second, if you insist on republishing them, knowing that by reprinting them you are spreading them to people who might potentially misuse or believe them, or even play with unconscious suspicions, then you better well treat the topic with sensitivity and ensure that you have proven the material to be false and offensive.
Now understand that the charges mentioned in the article against Obama are considered in the blogosphere to be deeply racist, wildly offensive, and totally unfounded.
Returning to Baker:
The reporter wrote the story because a voter in Iowa told him that Obama is a Muslim and he was struck that people remain so ill informed. That sort of misinformation has been common out there and, as the story showed, spread by some people in an attempt to taint Obama. But somehow a story intended to debunk the false claims, trace their origin and explore the challenge they present the campaign in trying to quash them spawned a furious eruption among liberal bloggers accusing the Post of spreading the rumors.
Any reasonable reading of the story makes clear they are not true. Right there in the second paragraph, it says Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ in Chicago. In other words, a Christian, not a Muslim. And yet the bloggers seem to think readers are so stupid they will actually think the Post is saying the opposite. The story's obvious intent is to clarify, which it did. If people are misinformed about a key aspect of a major presidential candidate to his detriment, then journalism performs a service by addressing misinformation. And if foes are using unfounded rumors to damage a candidate, especially in a subterranean way, then journalism should expose that. Critics can reasonably debate this or that wording in the story, but certainly the intent is clear no matter how much it is distorted on the Web.
Leaving aside that in the span of two paragraphs Baker notes a reporter "struck that people could be so ill informed" voters are about Obama's religion and then questions how anyone in the blogosphere could believe readers are stupid enough to believe the charges ––– leaving aside those contradictions, this defense is fundamentally dishonest:
1. The Post article "debunks" none of the charges. Nowhere does the article call them "false" or "misinformation."
As Baker says, right there in the second paragraph, the article states that Obama is a member of a church, and as Bacon claimed yesterday, the article also quotes the campaign's 'denials.' But, first, the charges do not dispute that he belongs to a church ––– indeed, the charge cited in the Post claims that Obama, baffingly, only joined the church over twenty years ago with the purpose of misleading people during a later run for president, and that he secretly received an Islamic education that he is not trying to hide.
The Post consistently shies away from making an explicit rejection of the charges, only deferring to campaign spokespersons who "deny." The Post nowhere mentions that actual journalists have conducted lengthy investigations, visited the school in Indonesia, interviewed friends, relatives, locals, and found there to be absolutely no basis to the charges.
The Post never states objectively or quotes evidence that these claims are false. But Baker would know this if he actually read any of the blog posts that he is criticizing, which have gone through the Post article practically line by line. And his condescension is not going to help.
Lastly, Baker fails to acknowledge that it's not just pesky 'partisan bloggers' that have complained about the article. It's the Columbia Journalism Review and Media Matters. It's Ben Smith of the Politico, who wrote:
I do think in covering the Obama-as-Islamist-Manchurian-candidate whispering campaign — an important, interesting and legit story — it's pretty important to clearly label it a smear.
And it's the Washington Post's own cartoonist, who yesterday lampooned the paper.
UPDATE 1: Via dharmafarmer in the comments, Glenn Greenwald has a great post up:
"Setting the record straight" would mean having the reporter report the facts and identify the false statements as false. But the Post did the opposite; it simply passed on each side's "views" without comment -- the factually true side and the factually false side -- as though they merited equal weight.
But Romano defends this practice as "setting the record straight." Here again we see an explicit statement of the corrupt view that so many establishment journalists now have of their role: "we pass on factual falsehoods from one side, note that the other side denies them, and call it a day. Then we've done our job." [...]
For various reasons, they simply will not investigate such claims and, when warranted, identify such claims as false. The most they are willing to do is simply write down each side's claims and treat them equally, even when one side is blatantly lying.
Greenwald highlights the New York Times article taking down Giuliani's claims about his tenure as mayor as a counterexample of what real journalism should look like.
UPDATE 2: BarbinMD has a post up on the frontpage too, highlighting the Washington Post's Lois Romano's response to the controversy.