Bob McDonnell and the Washington Post

What follows is adapted from a post I made at the Post's website today regarding 'Winners and Losers' from the just completed election cycle:

Among the losers, we should count the Washington Post for its highly problematic coverage of the Virginia governor's race:

1) The editorial board's endorsement of Democrat Creigh Deeds was no surprise, but the partisan and selectively one-sided nature of it indicated a lack of seriousness in appraising the campaign.

2) The Post's polling approach lacked credibility, and it showed. Not only were the Post's polls consistently wrong in lowballing the margin between Republican Bob McDonnell and Deeds (the Post's polls put the margin between 9-11 points), the Post actively poo-pooed other polls that had a far more accurate grasp of the true margin of separation (many other polls had the margin between 14-18 points). McDonnell won by 17-18 points. A 7-8 point margin of error makes the Post's polling methodology unreliable, and yet the Post was labeling the accurate polls as such. Can you say 'credibility gap'?

3) Related to #2, the Post seemed to take a 90 degree turn during the campaign in covering other poll results. In the beginning, the Post went on record saying they would not publicize other polls that they (the Post) had problems with in terms of methodology. After getting skewered over this highly subjective and arbitrary decision, the Post reversed course in the last month and was giving some limited airplay to other polls (which turned out to be more accurate than the Post's own polls). This indicated the lack of a reliable compass in guiding what the newsroom (not the editorial staff) thought was newsworthy. The Post's late stream course correction was the right decision, but it highlights how completely wrong their original position was as a matter of journalistic integrity. This kind of fumbling, bumbling, and stumbling is what hurt Deeds's credibility. It hurts the Post's as well.

4) The Post's metro section made a serious investment in pushing liberal concerns in its reporting. Beyond the Post's infamous obsession with McDonnell's thesis, the metro staff (again, I'm not talking about the editorial board) repeatedly approached the economic and transportation plans of the candidates from the perspective that higher taxes were the only real solution. First, one wonders if these people have looked at the economic condition in Maryland (high taxes, high unemployment, a population exodus to states with lower tax burdens) as part of formulating their own worldview. Second, it is a bit disingenuous for the beat staff to regularly trot out the line that a high wall of separation exists between the editorial board and the metro staff, as if this org chart somehow gets the metro staff off the hook for bringing their own biases to their coverage. It doesn't. It never has, it never will. Just because the metro staff at the Post might take umbrage at this suggestion doesn't make it false, at all. More likely it highlights the objectivity and non-agenda self-delusion that's so common in the press corps.

Nobody I know expected the Post's editorial board to give McDonnell a fair shake, and that's fair enough. While regretable, it's at least consistent and offers few surprises. But the conduct of the metro staff in this campaign has been noticed by many outside the beltway. After years of the Post taking tangible steps to improve its image as a news outlet that shows at least some concern about being fair with diverse viewpoints, I fear that its performance this time around will undo a good bit of that among those who are not partisan Democrats.

In a follow-up editorial today, the editorial board expressed its hope that McDonnell will prove them wrong on all the areas in which they took issue with him. Well, many of us are quite entitled to petition the Post for the same thing. If I were to write an editorial to the Post, I would urge them to seriously listen to the many well deserved criticisms they have received about their conduct in this campaign. Their performance has been disappointing as a matter of journalism. The Post needs to be more intentional about promoting viewpoint diversity in their own ranks to help ensure that future campaigns are covered with a level of respect for differing views that comes with having a staff of differing views. I fear that absent this, the Post will continue to fundamentally misunderstand non-liberal thought and those who adhere to it, and that this misunderstanding will continue to taint their coverage and invite deserved repudiation.