I subscribe to the Sunday Washington Post and read the daily on-line. The thing about the Post is, I imagine people still think the WaPo is either trying to be objective or slanted to the left. Ha. Every week, the Outlook Section gets me. This Sunday, I was almost all the way through, and pleasantly surprised that nothing had made me rabid yet, when I hit an editorial entitled Lessons of War. That sorry-ass apologia was spinning so fast, I had to get out the Sea Bands.
Slate, aka the Washington Post's attempt at entering the 21st centur, is now publishing similar crap, although disguised as actual fact rather than opinion. Take this article about U.S. infant mortality rates. The article notes that U.S. infant mortality rates are higher than many other developed countries and that while many (silly!) people argue that this shows a need for better health care, in fact, the high U.S. infant mortality rates result from too much healthcare. The argument goes that, one, the increases in assisted reproduction have resulted in multiples and multiples are often at-risk preemies. Plus, the author argues, neonate units are cash cows of some sort, so infants are referred to neonate units willy-nilly, where they are promptly killed. (Because hospitals with larger NICU units have better results than hospitals with smaller NICU units, but lots of hospitals build NICUs anyway so they can kill babies for profit).
Problem is, the Save the Children report cited in the article clearly states the wickedly unsurprising fact that infant mortality in the U.S. is related to low socioeconomic status, minority background, and low education levels. These poor, undereducated minorities are not having twins and triplets due to in vitro, sorry. What they are having is low birth weight babies. There are a number of factors that contribute to low birth weight in at-risk populations, notably smoking, low maternal weight gain, genital and oral microbial infections, and exposure to violence and environmental toxins such as lead paint. Meanwhile, I don't think hospitals are getting rich off of the medicare payments, because these women don't typically have private insurance. But, quick, someone tell them how their babies are dying because of too much health care.
The WaPo editorial that enraged me argued that George Bush didn't lie about the war, he just cherry-picked and "exaggerated" the evidence*; in other words, he was simply willfully ignorant, not bad. So I wonder, is this article a pack of lies or is it just willfully ignorant? More to the point, what the fuck does it matter? If someone with information manipulates that information in a way to give an impression that lies are truth and truth are lies, do we really need to stop and have a semantic discussion about how the lies weren't really lies, they were just mistruths? Is there such a thing as the public trust anymore? Now that "mistakes were made" has become the standard answer, is there such a thing as responsibility, or am I just being silly and old-fashioned? I can't believe it actually needs to be said but: people and entities in positions of control over information, like, say, the POTUS and the media, are responsible to take care with the information they disseminate and can't just pull pet theories out of their asses and pass them off as fact.
No one should be surprised to see the Post not at the cutting edge of opinion. (Just as information, I currently subscribe to the Phila. Inquirer and follow the Post and several other papers on-line.)
I am a long time reader of the Post, since, I think, 1968, when I started having it delivered to my dorm room at college.
In the intervening years, working as a road warrior, I've read papers all over the country. Whether or not you or I agree with the opinions of some of its columnists or editorial writers, the Post remains one of the best papers in the USA.
Contrary to the image fostered by Richard Nixon as part of his defense against the Watergate stories and perpetuated by many persons over the years, the Post has never leaned left.
It's always been, in its editorial policy, staunchly and blandly somewhere between slightly right and stolidly, dully middle.
It's strength is its reportage, not its opinions.
It wasn't editorial writers who outed Nixon. It was reporters. And it was reporters who outed Walter Reed Hospital.
Posted by: Frank | March 22, 2007 at 05:03 PM
The piece I was talking about was in Slate, not the Post per se, and it was not an opinion piece, it was a badly done analysis. I've been reading the Post for a number of years now, but recently its opinion pages have reached a new level of dreck. It used to strike me as more representative of a range of opinions. Now, it seems extreme. Conservatives I can handle, Bush apologists go beyond what I consider to be a reasonable range of opinion.
Posted by: Aquagirl | March 22, 2007 at 09:32 PM