I follow many narrative threads on the internet upon which I rarely comment. The liberal murmuring about the on-going public embarrassment that is The Washington Post is something that needs a comment, I think, if for no reason other than it still sits on my link-list.
The meaningless "liberal media" nonsense of the right is easy enough to disprove; all one need do is point, say, to Eric Alterman's book-length analysis about the reality of media bias to show up that particular urban legend for the nonsense that it is. More than that, however, with the rise of editor Fred Hiatt, the Post has taken a deliberate turn, not so much away from a liberal slant to a more conservative one, as much as it has quite openly courted a certain group who, at one time, certainly held the reins of power and could be considered the shapers of conventional wisdom in the nation's capital.
Anymore, however, those men and women - David Broder, George Will, Kathleen Parker, Michael Gerson - are more and more exposed as either irrelevant, intellectually dishonest and bankrupt, or morally and politically confused. With the addition of Marc Thiessen, and a seemingly deliberate anti-science stance vis-a-vis climate change, the paper whose fame was sealed when two of its reporters hounded a sitting President and his advisers until their entire house collapsed under the weight of public exposure of wrong-doing, is now, as one internet writer called it yesterday, "fish-wrapper".
While an argument could be made that the editorial stance of the paper is distinct from its reporting (one hears this all the time in relation to, say, the Clinton-era Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages were filled with conspiratorial drivel, but whose news pages were actually quite well-written with a careful attention to factual detail), but just a glance at the on-line front-page today shows how that distinction, which has always seemed to me to be largely artificial, cannot possibly be taken seriously.
I will not harp on the "conservative turn" of the editorial page or op-ed page. I will not carry on about what journalism "should be" (a habit of far too many non-journalists that exposes their ignorance more than any bad habits of journalists). I just note all this to say that I do and will keep the Post on my link list. Nostalgia? Perhaps. Hope that it may yet change not so much to a liberal stance as an intellectually honest and coherent one?
No, I don't hold out hope for that any time soon.
