Tucked away in an article about how recycling has become a losing proposition and recycling companies and facilities are deeply in the red, was a surprising reason.

“Trying to encourage conservation, progressive lawmakers and environmentalists have made matters worse. By pushing to increase recycling rates with bigger and bigger bins — while demanding almost no sorting by consumers — the recycling stream has become increasingly polluted and less valuable, imperiling the economics of the whole system,” Aaron C. Davis of The Washington Post wrote on June 20.

Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever loved the latest HBO documentary on "gun carnage," as the Monday headline has it. Online, the headline was "A deep wallow in gun-related senselessness."

It was "remarkably good" and "notably free of a direct anti-gun harangue," Stuever wrote, but he was still depressed that HBO was only preaching to the liberal choir ("people already horrified by gun violence and gun culture") and the film "won't ever be seen by those who most need to see it."

Poor Juan Williams. So occasionally correct, as when he wrote forcefully on the damage done by an urban culture which has made so many black children "believe that excelling in math and science is 'acting white.'"

But he's also so often egregiously wrong, perhaps never moreso than in his Monday column at the Hill. Williams is astonished that a recent poll, consistent with others, shows that over two-thirds of blacks support a photo identification requirement for voting. In the process, he cited perhaps the dumbest statistic I've ever seen on the topic, misrepresented a 2013 Supreme Court decision, and failed to understand that blacks may end up being most adversely affected if voter fraud ever become widespread.

In a Friday column, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank again misquoted a conservative, where he attacked pro-lifers for not being "on the right side of logic" for opposing abortion, but not supporting "contraceptives [which] would seriously reduce abortions." Milbank cited Americans United for Life's Charmaine Yoest, who supposedly stated, "'I haven't seen anything' to convince her that more contraceptive use reduces abortions. She [Yoest] pointed to Guttmacher's 2011 findings that between 2001 and 2008, a reduction in the proportion of pregnancies ending in abortion 'could represent increased difficulty in accessing abortion services.'"

In late September 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released "A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States, 2000-2013."

To say the least, the report's issuance, timed six weeks before the midterm elections, and its topic ("a specific type of shooting situation law enforcement and the public may face") were curious. Given the press's inclination to sensationalize and politicize any report on gun violence, its findings were especially vulnerable to misinterpretation. When that quite predictably happened, the FBI and the study's authors appear to have done nothing to correct errant media reports. It also appears that they would have remained silent about those media distortions if longtime gun rights advocate John Lott Jr. hadn't called them out in a professional criminal justice journal.