Here’s the outgoing Washington Post ombudsman’s diagnosis of the Post’s malaise:
But it has become riddled with typos, grammatical mistakes and intolerable “small” factual errors that erode credibility. Local news coverage, once robust, has withered. The Post often trails the competition on stories. The excessive use of anonymous sources has expanded into blogs. The once-broken system for publishing corrections has been repaired, but corrections often still take too long to appear. The list goes on.
If I had to give a couple of reasons why I don’t read the Washington Post much, it would be the belief, fair or not, that their editorial page — a neocon Pravda, with a smattering of senile Villager conventional wisdom — drives their news coverage. The other reason is that they are obsessively focused on the dullest trivia of Washington, DC. They rarely break any interesting DC news, and they almost never have anything interesting to say about the world outside the Beltway. They are the paper of record for the Village at a time when the Village is on its way out.
Kryptik
And on an additional reason, that the esteemed ombudsman intimated before: The idea that, no matter how many neocon morons they staff, no matter how many John Bolton op-eds they run wondering why we haven’t glassed Iran yet, the paper, and ESPECIALLY the op-ed section, is simply just too liberal for Real Americans.
morzer
Shorter Ombudsman:
Why would anyone purchase an illiterate, out-of-date, ignorant and irrelevant pile of crap like this?
tofubo
oh, publishers of yore, what has become of you ??
“These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you: and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, lot its exploitation” (Chicago: Public Publishing, 1906), p. 157
DougJ DougJson
I agree. He focuses on things that might not be fixable, i.e. the fact that their staffs are now too small to do a good job of copy editing. Maybe there is some smart way to do copy editing more cheaply, maybe not.
But you could certainly produce a better editorial page without spending any more money.
PeakVT
Sounds about right. It’s economic policy coverage almost always regurgitates Pete Peterson’s worldview – Social Security broken, taxes too high, etc.
QDC
That’s why so many more people are turning toward the internet for news, where copy editing is meticulous and tiny factual details are punctiliously correct. It’s so wrong it hurts.
In your opinion is WaPo the major paper that is most panicky about accusations of liberal bias?
Rennie
Ingrown toe?
I think you mean ingrown toenail.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Does he mention the blatant attempt to copy the Washington Time’s editorial policies? How about the More Air Less Content, Clearly Cribbed From The WSJ redesign of the print version? (You know, the one people pay to read.)
What the fuck?
Christ, talk about can’t see the forest because you’re too busy fucking a tree and complaining about the splinters.
Xecky Gilchrist
This analysis blaming the paper’s troubles on the little stuff reminds me a bit of Karen Hughes’ “listening tour” in 2005 or so – when the Bush folks decided that the way to stop Middle Easterners from hating the U.S. was not to stop bombing them, but to send people around to really really explain why we were so awesome as or even because we were bombing them.
Dekk
What makes you say the Village is on the way out? That is an interesting thesis that I would like to hear defended.
MattF
So, yeah, it’s badly written, badly edited, understaffed, out of money, doesn’t cover local news or foreign news… But it’s owned and managed by the right kind of people, so everything is going to be okey-dokey. Cripes.
YellowDog
I have been a Post subscriber for 22 years. The decline is more than just typos. The editorial page is full of conservative hacks (Kathleen Parker) and once-readable but now ideological conservative hacks (Will and Krauthammer). The sports section has declined markedly in quality–Kornheiser and Wilbon were ruined by ESPN and are now, thankfully, gone. Of the replacements, only Mike Wise is worth reading. The investigative reporting is uneven, but still among the best when they take their time to do it right. I am seriously considering dropping the weekly delivery and reading it on my iPad. I will miss the experience of reading the comics last, but most of those are available online through RSS feeds. I will also miss the tactile experience of turning pages, but I have adjusted to reading books on my iPad, so I guess it will be OK.
PeakVT
@DougJ DougJson: The Degree Mill Daily could produce a better op-ed page cheaper for sure. Better for the readers, that is.
Brachiator
I agree very much with your critique of WaPo, where do you get that the Village is on its way out?
If anything, thanks to the Republican wins in the mid terms, the Empire is fighting back. And while the Intertubes is drowning in opinion, anything resembling actual news is diminishing by the hour. On top of this, the telecomms, cable companies, and media outlets are looking for new ways to make sure you pay for the remaining crumbs.
They have even come up with an eco friendly term for their attempt to control access to information, the “walled garden.” Not only is news becoming extinct, but the battle to keep the Web free and open is being waged on new fronts, and the good guys are losing.
Villago Delenda Est
Ways to fix the WaPo:
1. Retire Broder.
2. Remove Sally Quinn from the Village Social scene. If Bradlee objects, too bad.
3. Terminate Fred Hiatt by running him through the printing press.
piratedan
I wonder if its still the perception that the Post is “liberal” because they were responsible for the assist on taking down Nixon.
Phoebe
Yes yes yes yes yes, but this makes up for all of that. Maybe.
Davis X. Machina
@piratedan: They don’t make movies about ordinary events. All the Presidents’ Men was a ‘man bites dog story’, that was the point — Post journos turn on government, for once. The rest of the time, the Post is what it’s always been — it’s a company paper in a one-industry town.
I’m surprised the hermetic tendencies of the Post never summoned another Newsday into being, that covered the suburbs and especially NoVa, which unlike MD doesn’t have a Baltimore as an alternative center of gravity. The Asbury Park paper in NJ also comes to mind. There’s no real city there for it to cover, but a lot of people.
Elisabeth
Sounds like my local paper. But it’s to be expected when the paper cuts down on staff to the point where the product suffers.
mistermix
@Rennie: Yeah, fixed it.
Beth in VA
I don’t know, I really like The Plum Line by Greg Sargeant. I see the Washington Post kind of like CNN is on TV–sure, it’s not stellar all the time, but we really need to have a straight news source that’s based on educated journalism rather than on ideology.
It’s not the old WSJ straight international/financial reporting, and the arts & science sections can’t hold a candle to the NYT, but it’s not worth giving up on. It’s not the Washington Times. It’s an important institution that can be improved, imho.
eemom
@YellowDog:
Same here, except I STILL haven’t managed to summon the courage to cancel my subscription. I have no idea what is wrong with me.
It’s like being married to the corrupt, delusional, drug-addled, bankrupt, philandering son of a once-respected family, and not being able to sign the divorce papers.
PeakVT
@Davis X. Machina: There was a network of local papers run by Journal Newspapers for the major counties (Fairfax, Montgomery, and Prince George’s) but they always kinda sucked. The were bought, merged, and renamed to become the Washington Examiner.
DougJ DougJson
@Beth in VA:
I like Greg Sargent too. From what I understand, he and Ezra Klein are incredibly successful in terms of generating pageviews. I once had a conversation with a reasonably knowledgeable reporter who told me they were much more widely read than the “official” editorials.
And yet Alexander bitches about the blogs. He was a terrible ombudsman and he won’t be missed.
PanAmerican
If only Amalgamated Buggy Whip employees focused on quality and built a product to customer taste.
WaPo is a fucked company in a dying industry.
sven
@YellowDog: Totally agree about Mike Wise. Interestingly, he seems to be one of the few folks at WaPo who understands the problem and has actually attempted to address the issue. His now (in)famous Ben Roethlisberger hoax at least tried to make a point about how modern journalism has become a circle-jerk rather than real investigation.
It goes without saying that WaPo administered a ritual beating rather than address substantial issues.
Mike in NC
@piratedan:
Probably that, and maybe if someone searched way way back the Post might have written something mean about Joe McCarthy. The grudges in the Village last a very long time.
Kryptik
@Beth in VA:
@DougJ DougJson:
The only problem I have there is that 1) it’s not in the dead tree, where you get John Bolton at least once a month espousing the virtues of glassing the middle east. Well, that and being the top web draw didn’t exactly save Froomkin from being shitcanned.
Harpo
The Examiner is unreadable right-wing crap — so ideological it infuses the news coverage. Check it out, it’s obvious. So I don’t look at it.
The Post, for its neo-con leanings — still adheres to the traditional journalistic credo of attempting to be fair. Yes you do find plenty of examples of stories riddled with unnamed sources who are obviously pushing a line — and yes, the editorial page is full of right-wing hacks, as you say, and the arts coverage is really poor. Stinking poor. They have a couple of good critics–Peter Marks and Ann Hornaday — but they still run political features in the Style section — as if you can’t get enough political articles in the rest of the paper.
But I digress. I read it because I have to read a daily paper of some kind or I feel more ignorant than I already am. The Wash. Times is dreck, the Examiner sucks, and the NYT is way to expensive to take a daily basis.
But Donald Graham is a disgrace to his family.
Bill Murray
@Beth in VA:
I certainly agree this is needed, but does the Kaplan really do this?
Theophylact
I subscribe because it’s more convenient than reading the funnies online, because it has Tom Toles, and because the movie schedule runs daily. Other than that, it’s just stuff to put under the parrot cage. It has few critics worth reading now that Blake Gopnik is gone, its business coverage is vestigial and its science coverage ludicrous.
Honestly, it’s just a habit; kinda like keeping your AOL service.
SteveinSC
@Mike in NC: That’s because the Villagers are generally old people. Not surprisingly WaPo’s irreducible readership (a la the 23 percent irreducible moronic voters) is the number of Villagers. That is because they need the WaPo for their morning shit. Without this “function” stemming from WaPo there would be some major “work” stoppage in DC. Better than concentrated prune juice to these old fuckers.
SteveinSC
Damn, somebody older than 70 on this blog.
Sharon
@PeakVT: I had no idea that Journal papers morphed into the Examiner. The Examiner tried to move into the Baltimore market, but they couldn’t compete with the hollowed out shell of The Baltimore Sun.
Janus Daniels
@Dekk: same here; beat me to it. “… the Village is on its way out.”
I wish.
Mike in NC
@efgoldman:
Me, too. I turned 18 in ’72 and cast my first vote for McGovern. You know, any actual war hero unlike Bush, Cheney, Gingrich, et al.
ET
@YellowDog: Totally agree about the editorial pages. A total waste of pulp. Those pages alone are the biggest reason I have seriously been thinking for stopping my subscription. That and Fred Hiatt which is sort of the same thing.