Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald is incensed (11/02/08, ad-viewing required) over a column that had Washington Post Ombud Deborah Howell
claiming that one reason that the Post and other papers are losing money is because they are “too liberal,” have had “more favorable stories about Barack Obama than John McCain,” and “conservatives are right that they often don’t see their views reflected enough in the news pages.” To mitigate newspapers’ financial problems, Howell decrees: “The imbalance still needs to be corrected.” She adds: “Neither the hard-core right nor left will ever be satisfied by Post coverage–and that’s as it should be.”
What if the actual facts–i.e., “reality”–are consistent with the views of “the hard-core left” and contrary to the views of the “hard-core right”? What if, as has plainly been the case, the conservatives’ views are wrong, false, inaccurate? What if the McCain campaign was failing and relying on pure falsehoods and sleazy attacks, and the Post‘s coverage simply reflected that reality? It doesn’t matter. In order to sell more newspapers, according to Howell, the Post‘s news coverage must shape itself to the right and ensure that “their views [are] reflected enough in the news pages” (I don’t recall Howell complaining when her newspaper–according to its own media critic–systematically suppressed anti-war viewpoints in its news pages and loudly amplified pro-Bush and pro-war views).
Relatedly, check out FAIR’s latest Action Alert: “The Washington Post Undercounts Iraq Deaths: Paper’s Feature Low-Balls Iraqi Casualties” (10/27/08)
