Howell: No Matter How Bad McCain Is, Our Opinion Pages Must Pretend He’s Great
Washington Post ombudswoman Deborah Howell calls for less intellectual honesty on the Post’s opinion pages:
The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces (58) about McCain than there were about Obama (32), and Obama got the editorial board’s endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.
This is pretty absurd. Some institutions try to put forward a fairly consistent ideological point of view. It’s clear that The Washington Post op-ed section tries to do no such thing. Instead, its columnists represent a range of views. And it’s surely to the Post’s credit that when George Will, one of their conservative columnists, found himself not-so-psyched about John McCain and his campaign that he said so. Similarly, Anne Applebaum is a Post columnist who’s hard to classify but might at one point have been thought likely to be enthusiastic about John McCain. But she didn’t like the direction he and his campaign took, so she wrote a column laying out her thinking:
Yesterday, while reading the latest polling data on John McCain, Sarah Palin and their appeal — or growing lack of it — to ” independent women voters” it suddenly dawned on me: I am one of these elusive independent female voters, and I have the credentials to prove it. For the past couple of decades, I’ve sometimes voted Democratic, sometimes Republican. I’m even a registered independent, though I did think of switching to vote for John McCain in 2000. But because the last political party I truly felt comfortable with was Thatcher’s Conservative Party (I lived in England in the 1980s and 1990s), I didn’t actually do it.
The larger point, though, is that if I’m not voting for McCain — and, after a long struggle, I’ve realized that I can’t — maybe it’s worth explaining why, for I suspect there are other independent voters who feel the same. Particularly because it’s not his campaign, disjointed though that has been, that finally repulses me: It’s his rapidly deteriorating, increasingly anti-intellectual, no longer even recognizably conservative Republican Party. His problems are not technical; they do not have to do with ads, fundraising or tactics, as some have suggested. They are institutional; they have to do with his colleagues, advisers and supporters.
Presumably, this sort of thing is what an ideologically diverse op-ed page is supposed to be doing. The fact that the Post’s liberals were more enthusiastic about Obama than the conservatives were about McCain reflected an enthusiasm gap that existed in the country. The fact that a centrist Post columnist like Applebaum had a lot of nice things to say about McCain the man and McCain the maverick but ultimately didn’t like the 2008 vintage McCain reflected the fact that McCain was extremely popular with independents and moderates at one time, but became less popular as he re-remade himself into a more orthodox conservative. Similarly, that a neocon like Charles Krauthemmer liked McCain more than did a traditionalist conservative like Will reflected reality on the ground.
What should the Post have done? Told Applebaum that to maintain balance she had to vote for McCain? Told Will he was going to get fired unless he joined Krauthammer in becoming a McCain enthusiast? That would have been bizarre
70 Responses to “Howell: No Matter How Bad McCain Is, Our Opinion Pages Must Pretend He’s Great”
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November 10th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
As I’ve explained, when formerly-liberal media hire conservatives for balance in response to outside pressure, the conservatives don’t really report to the people who “hired” them, but to the outside pressure groups — in some cases (Kristol, Goldberg) there’s not even any distinction. They are political commissars (or zampolits), and being Republican is part of their job description.
Brooks and Will are still hard-core Republicans — they’re just positioning themselves for the intra-party struggle. It’s only the Palin Republicans who are mad at them.
To my knowledge, none of the liberal media are as doggedly loyal as affirmative-action hire-the-handicapped conservative hires like Goldberg and Kristol. They’re just natural Democrats, somewhat eclectic in their views, and they’ve been under steady pressure for 20 years to be more “objective”. But no one wants conservative hires to be objective.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
A registered independent? Seriously? I thought the only people that did that were rubes.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
That Howell piece bothered me a lot too. It’s not just the op-ed page, her criticism of the news coverage seemed to involve counting positive and negative stories and noting the disparity. It’s really strange that an ombudsman seems to have no awareness of the difference between “positive” coverage and “favorable” coverage. It’s as if she thinks the newsroom should not have allowed any events in the campaign or the real world (not to mention the greater popularity of the Democratic Party) to disturb the delicate equilibrium of 50% pro-Democrat and 50% pro-Republican stories. Truly bizarre!
November 10th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
On the other hand………..
November 10th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
The orientation of the Washington Post is neo — you can argue over whether it’s neocon or neoliberal, but it’s definitely neo-something. That’s partly to do with the huge number of military-industrial complex consultants and the like in the Post’s circulation area (e.g., Lockheed moved from LA to DC), and partly to do with the owning family’s loyalties.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Maybe the logic is that on an ‘opinion’ page, writers ought to have ‘opinions’, rather than, say, ideas, thoughts, whatever. If Anne Applebaum can’t make up her mind, it’s not actually illegal for her to write about it– but writing about her indecision on an opinion page is simply inappropriate.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
A registered independent? Seriously? I thought the only people that did that were rubes.
It would depend on the state, I think. Some states let Independents vote in either primary, but those who register with a party can only vote in their party’s primary. That’d be a good reason, I think, to register independent. Other states, like my current state of Pennsylvania, have closed primaries that independents can’t vote in. In states like that, it’s just foolishness to be an independent (a friend of mine, who lives in Philadelphia, insists on registering independent, even though he pretty much always votes for the Democrat, and registering independent means you don’t get to participate in the Democratic primary, which is the only meaningful election for city-wide offices. Some sort of knee-jerk principle that he is not a member of a party seems to motivate this.)
November 10th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
“…writing about her indecision on an opinion page is simply inappropriate.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’m not sure if I agree with MattF on this point. Should people discussing or airing out their views on an issue make it known they’re undecided? Can their indecision be simply a part of the discussion that needs taken into account by others? Can it highlight the ambiguity or unknowns of an issue? I can’t decide.
November 10th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
It is well known that facts have an inherent liberal bias. The Post usually does a good job of hiding or distorting facts to create balance, but I guess they fell down on the job this go round (likely because of an unnatural intrusion of reality, like McCain’s flaing bailout response, his staff’s admission that he losses if the public focuses on the issues, and the epic fail of Palin compared to his experience attacks on Obama).
Hopefully, by 2012 the Post will have their mild “fact” infection under control and will instead focus on the balanced thoughts from Washington’s Serious People.
November 10th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
“If Anne Applebaum can’t make up her mind, it’s not actually illegal for her to write about it– but writing about her indecision on an opinion page is simply inappropriate.”
This makes no sense at all. Disliking both candidates is an opinion–even if I disagree with it, I find it better than someone who actually wants John McCain to be President.
November 10th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
@steve duncan–
I’m not saying that I agree with that logic (I don’t), just that maybe that’s what Howell is thinking. But maybe she’s just not thinking at all– I’m not really all that good at telepathy.
November 10th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I would bet that if you did a different study of the Post’s coverage, you could find that they favored McCain by peddling false equivalency stories like the one mentioned here The only problem was that they could not even find enough flimsy Obama mistakes to balance out John McCain’s unhinged, untruthful campaign of fear and bullshit.
November 10th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
What is the role of an ombudsman? I thought it was basic to fact check. In other words, if someone on the opinion page said something demonstrably wrong, it would be up to that person to point it out. I looked up the term at Wikipedia and it seemed to boil down to governmental positions and involved investigating complaints. In other words, if enough people complain about a story, they’re charged with evaluating it. But doesn’t there have to be something wrong with it in order to criticize it? Whether a majority of stories are positive or negative of a sort is irrelevant. The question is, did they say something wrong.
Now, if the Posts goal of the op-ed page is simply to print a range of opinions from far right to far left and they arent’ doing that, then I suppose I could see a complaint, but it seems like a dumb goal to me.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
In other contexts, this has been called replacing equality of opportunity with equality of result….
November 10th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Did Li’l Debbie run the numbers on positive and negative stories about Bush and, say, Hugo Chavez? Dear me.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Nowhere in the article does she say that the op-ed pages ought to not have a tilt, or that the columnists and editorialist ought to be intellectually dishonest in order to have untilted coverage.
Uh-oh… I agree with Al. I didn’t see her advocate a different approach – just a little numbers crunching on whether this was an accurate observation. If anything, she did some WaPo cheerleading, but mostly of their news coverage.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Should accused murders expect that 50% of stories about them be positive? No. Stories and news should reflect the truth, rather than an arbitrary balance.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Anne Applebaum is not a “centrist” in any meaningful sense of the term.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Howell is on the right track. She should next examine the liberal press’s disgusting take on Katrina, which began the propaganda assault leading to our present slide into communism. Do you know, not one article was pro-Katrina? Katrina did amazing things – helped end the endemic pathological poverty of New Orleans by creative destruction – and President Bush, a hero whose villification has only served Al Qaeda, had the foresight to welcome Katrina to our shores. But where is the fairness? Where the articles pointing out what a marvel it is to get winds to blow so fast? We admire the Grand Canyon, after all – we use the fine rich soil layed down by volcanoes oh so many thousands of years ago, in Noah’s time. And yet the secular humanist press – showing its utter contempt for science as well as Bush derangement syndrome – couldn’t bring itself to say how aweinspiring Katrina was! Day after day, it was how bad Katrina was. No appreciation at all of God’s handiwork!
Well, the only solution is to turn to the fair and balanced network, plus read the Washington Times. Al and I are going to do that right now – there’s a fascinating special on I.D. derangement syndrome on at 7, showing how the liberal elite are censoring massive evidence showing that the bumble bee was created on January 2, 6000 B.C., as a sort of late gift to the earth by our creator.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Crunching the numbers is a stupid way of doing this. I’m sure the Post has a lot of articles that are negative on the North Korean economy, but that’s because the North Korean economy sucks.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Hey Al, you give away the fact that you are a bitter, recently unemployed Palin flack by your excessive use of the phrase “in the tank” and your erroneous accusation of Matt being a “left-winger” in the vain hopes that it will somehow discredit him.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
After all, it’s been scientifically proven that the media in general was amazingly biased in favor of Obama.
That is just plain laugh-out-loud funny. Good one, Al. Keep ‘em coming.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Simple query.
What negative Obama stories should have been run that weren’t?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He could have stood to resoled his shoes a bit more often.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
it stuns me that people who i would assume have full lives would spend any more time “analyzing” her statement than it takes to write: howell is a tool. again.
i do understand that it is necessary to keep pointing this stuff out because it keeps happening but …
November 10th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
oh, yeah. al (above) is a tool as well.
you might not have noticed, al, but the press reflected the campaign. mccain ran a bad campaign and it was covered. obama ran an very good AND substantive campaign which was covered.
explain to me how the coverage proves the media was “in the tank for obama”?
November 10th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
What is the role of an ombudsman?
I always thought it was the person who procured the, um, buds, man.
Ah, college.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
what the post should have done long ago was fired deborah howell, but apparently ombudspeople have the same tenure as op-ed columnists.
roger at 4:17: brilliant.
al: stick to sports so you don’t embarass yourself any further. “scientifically proven:” you’ve got to be kidding!
November 10th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I thought the only people that did that were rubes.
The typical Independent is someone who is convinced that he or she is such a special and unique snowflake that no one party could ever possibly describe the complexity of his or her views. Of course, such people are, in their own way, rubes.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
What is the role of an ombudsman?
The role of an Ombud is to represent the readers. I find it perfectly believable that there is a segment of readers that wants more positive stories and opinions to be told about McCain and the Republicans, even if the facts don’t owe them any such positive stories.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
al, i urged you not to embarass yourself, but you couldn’t resist.
first off, judging the “tone” of a news story is not – i repeat, not – an act of “science.” it is an act of “sociology.”
second of all, you badly misrepresent the pew study (i’m not going to bother confirming this by looking at the second study). interested readers can find pew’s own summary of its findings here:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1001/campaign-media
just as an example, here’s how pew actually characterizes its own findings:
One question likely to be posed is whether these findings provide evidence that the news media are pro-Obama. Is there some element in these numbers that reflects a rooting by journalists for Obama and against McCain, unconscious or otherwise? The data do not provide conclusive answers. They do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begets winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions. Obama’s coverage was negative in tone when he was dropping in the polls, and became positive when he began to rise, and it was just so for McCain as well. Nor are these numbers different than those we have seen before. Obama’s numbers are similar to what we saw for John Kerry four years ago as he began rising in the polls, and McCain’s numbers are almost identical to those recorded eight years ago for Democrat Al Gore.
and finally, if al actually bothered to read the pew study (which i doubt), he would notice that the big drop in mccain’s coverage resulted from two factors: his totally erratic response to the financial crisis (i’m going to suspend the campaign; i’m going to go to washington and solve this; i went to washington and solved this; oops, my version didn’t pass; i guess i’m going to campaign again; i’ll vote for another version; my campaign will now say that i’m proud to have derailed the version i claimed i helped pass) and his campaign’s jump to all-negative, all-the-time.
like i say, al: stick to sports.
November 10th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Just to be clear – my earlier agreement with Al was only on the point that Howell made no call for redress.
I am amused that Al could use some variation of the word “science” 5 times in 5 sentences without either providing the link to the study, or describing the basic methodology, which can be done in a couple of sentences.
Kudos to Howard for providing the link and a little perspective.
It’s hard to describe the study as demonstrating that the press was “in the tank” for Obama when the second sentence is this one:
Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.
or how about this little tidbit:
Obama’s numbers are similar to what we saw for John Kerry four years ago as he began rising in the polls, and McCain’s numbers are almost identical to those recorded eight years ago for Democrat Al Gore.
There’s that mean ole liberal press treating McCain just as badly as they treated… Al Gore. Go figure.
November 10th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I know a few scientists, including, for instance, my father. Most of them would not only be skeptical of the claim that “it’s been scientifically proven that the media in general was amazingly biased in favor of Obama,” but are generally skeptical of the idea that anything can be “scientifically proven.” (Scientists are not the same as philosophers of science, but most of them are broadly educated and intelligent people who know a bit of philosophy of science and realize that the idea of “scientific proof” is problematic.)
November 10th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
So, just to recap:
Pew: “Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.”
Al describes Pew: “…coverage of Obama was fawningly positive.”
Pew also makes a direct comparison of McCain’s coverage to Gore’s, which further damages any notion that the coverage is driven by some sort of liberal bias, unless the press just recently became all liberal.
November 10th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Al is self-consciously trolling here.
It should be real easy for Al to name the negative stories that the media should have covered about Obama and yet didn’t. He hasn’t done it. Was Obama too consistent. Too unflappable. What?
November 10th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
even confronted with the exact words from pew, al continues to claim that the evidence is “unequivocal.”
there are times when i wonder how al got a law degree (or whether, in fact, he’s just joshing us about having one).
November 10th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Complaining about balance does not necessarily mean that they wanted less intellectual honesty. Perhaps they jsut thought that they shoul have hired more pro-McCain columnists, or increased the numbers of columns written by the pro-McCain columnists.
Nonetheless, if the complaint is about the editorial page, the opinion columnists represent a good balacne of views in general, and the opinion columnists were chosen long before the election, then complaining like this is stupid. A bias against McCain in that case would simply reflect the general attitude that people who care about politics have about him. Its not as i columnists were explicitly picked to produce a particular result vis-a-vis McCain.
November 10th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Good to see that MattY at least knows how to type out “intellectually honest”, even if he’s unable to actually do it.
Here’s my discussion of the WaPo article, including links to several instances of them lying and smearing to support BHO.
November 10th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Did Li’l Debbie run the numbers on positive and negative stories about Bush and, say, Hugo Chavez? Dear me.
Or go back in the Post archives and compare the coverage of say, Churchill and Hitler?
November 10th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
The Washington Post needs to balance out its leftist coverage by hiring more proud racists, like Steve Sailer and Stacey McCain, as well as more unabashed self-fellatalists, like Lone Whacko. I would steal that paper from my neighbor in a second.
November 10th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
After all, it’s been scientifically proven that the media in general was amazingly biased in favor of Obama. I know that left-wingers like Matthew hate science, so there’s no sense in recounting the scientific details proving that Obama received far better news coverage than McCain. But anyone who actually respects science knows that this is true. Howell’s unscientific review of the Post’s coverage merely reinforces what we already knew.
Is this the real Al speaking, or the clown Al? How could anyone tell?
November 10th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
24aheaddotcom points us to his very own personal fifth grade analysis of the wapo: be still my heart!
listen, sport: we see enough of your piffle here. why do you think any of us want to subject ourselves to a greater concentration of ignorance?
November 10th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I’m really angry at the WaPo because it didn’t run enough positivestories about my candidate: Chuck Baldwin.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:10 am
I’m just trying to figure out how one quantifies fawning.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:36 am
Well is the calibre of the candidates had been relatively equal, then she may have had a point. The distribution seems right to me. Stunningly stupid point in WaPo.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:09 am
In just a few minutes fact-checking of the Post, I found over thirty references to Barack Obama as “Black”, “African American” etc. I found no statements that McCain was black. This unfair bias is what almost certainly led to the great disparity in the way that black people cast their vote.
It is also shameful that the Post consistently referred to McCain as the Republican nominee, without ever stating that Obama was the Republican nominee. In fact, they went so far as to exclusively refer to Obama as the Democratic nominee, never once using that appellation for McCain. Considering the electoral climate, that was inexcusable bias.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:18 am
Anyone who says “I’m just sayin’”, isn’t just sayin’.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:21 am
I would love to see more Joe Biden stories instead of all this Sarah Palin nonsense…. seems like the media now wants to help her rehabilitate herself. But I also recognize that news outlets have to make decisions about what might be newsworthy; so I really don’t expect to see Matt Lauer hanging out in Joe Biden’s kitchen.
November 11th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
We knew about Obama’s admitted drug use, so I guess it was covered. There were attempts to locate “dealers” and even suggestions by a Hillary surrogate that Obama could have been a dealer (unsubstantiated of course).
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