Yet another angle on the Cadell/Schoen disaster, from someone who’s paid to examine the media. Tom Scocca, in Slate, on “Two Full-Time Obama Opponents [Who] Say Obama Should Pledge Not to Run Again“:
… This is bilge. Fred Hiatt, the insufferable editor of the Post’s opinion pages, seems to believe that people hate his section because he has clung with fearless integrity to his support for invading Iraq—WMD or none, operational ties between Saddam and al Qaeda or none—and because the section’s overall politics are to the right of the beliefs of the average reader of the Washington Post.
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Actually, the reason some of us despise Hiatt and his section is that he consistently chooses to print dishonest garbage, composed by disingenuous partisan hacks, lobbyists, or lobbyist-hacks. The Post opinion section is not a place where serious thinkers work through the issues of the day; it’s where professional propagandists float their newest lies, slogans, and unsubstantiated nonsense, to see if they can get them to bob into the political mainstream.
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If Schoen and Caddell are not insincere, they are an embarrassment as political experts: hostile to our system of government, ignorant of how it works, and thoroughly unacquainted with history. And that’s the charitable view. The uncharitable view is that they do know better, and they’re pretending not to. So which is it, Fred Hiatt? Did you want to print this piece because it was stupid, or because it was dishonest?
Scocca’s whole post is a wonderful, succinct, link-intensive summary of the whole dishonest, disingenuous mess.
Consider this an open thread.