Prepare for a lecture from The Washington Post. The paper has created a new video series to explain “how to be a reporter.” In the second video, reporter Stephanie McCrummen insisted that the Post’s “agenda” is simply “the truth.”
In an article on the video series, Editor and Publisher columnist Rob Tornoe on Tuesday warned: “It seems like these days there’s a war on objective truth, and reporters and the media companies they work for are more often than not finding themselves dead center in the crosshairs.”
Two of the “how to be a reporter” videos have been uploaded since the project began in December. In the second, Stephanie McCrummen, one of the Post’s journalists who investigated the accusations against failed Senate candidate Roy Moore, insisted:
We’re not there to be people’s friends. We’re not there for any other reason. As corny as it sounds, the agenda is to figure out what the reality is, what the truth is of the story.
Libby Casey, the video’s host, helped McCrummen: “You’re not there to be their friend. You’re also not there to be their cheerleader.”
If only that were true. If the Post aggressively investigated Democrats in the way it does Post, conservatives would not complain.
Yet, the paper does have “friends” and it is a “cheerleader” for Democrats. In 2012, the Post published a gushing 5,500 word front page story on Barack “Obama’s basketball love affair.”
In comparison, here’s now Brent Bozell and Tim Graham explained the Post’s “investigation” into a prank then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney may have played way back in 1965:
Reporter Jason Horowitz penned a 5,400-word "expose," a bombshell. on how Mitt Romney may have pinned a boy down and cut his hair in 1965. 1965. Nineteen sixty-five. That's almost a half- century ago. Even if every detail in this hit piece was accurate-and they weren't-how is it relevant? The same journalists that who couldn't find anything relevant in the mistresses Bill Clinton or John Edwards were "romancing" in the risky present of their presidential campaigns could somehow find something more compelling - a haircut -- in the yellowed past of Mitt Romney's high -school career. The Post carried several full pages of breathless prose under the big headline "Romney's pranks could go too far."
How do the Post reporters pursue journalistic truth? Here's another example: In 1993, reporter Michael Weisskopf smeared:
“Corporations pay public relations firms millions of dollars to contrive the kind of grass-roots
response that Falwell or Pat Robertson can galvanize in a televised sermon. Their followers are
largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.”
— Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf, February 1, 1993 front-page news story.
The next day, the paper issued a correction: There is no factual basis for that statement.” More recently, on August 28, 2017, the paper featured a headline: “How Trump is enabling famine.”
So, perhaps, the Post’s claim of having an “agenda” of “truth” strains credibility, just a little.
