Meltdown At The Mainstream Intersection

Temperatures reached the boiling point today in the battle between The Washington Post and news consumers outraged by last Sunday's column by the paper's ombudsman, Deborah Howell. PE readers will remember that the flap, which we've addressed previously, stems from Howell's statement that members of both political parties "have gotten" campaign money from Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The indicted Abramoff personally donated money only to Republicans, but the real scandal lies in who his clients gave to – members of both parties – and what they may have gotten in return. Democrats and their supporters have fiercely argued that only Republicans are involved in this mess.

Following the fury unleashed on the post.blog, many comments were deleted by the paper – something that made those outraged by her column, well, even more outraged. After a couple days of quiet (Howell did have a small dust-up with Media Matters about it, after which she reportedly vowed, "from now on, I don't reply"), the ombudsman popped back up on post.blog to offer a clarification of her wording:

"I've heard from lots of angry readers about the remark in my column Sunday that lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to both parties. A better way to have said it would be that Abramoff "directed" contributions to both parties.

Lobbyists, seeking influence in Congress, often advise clients on campaign contributions. While Abramoff, a Republican, gave personal contributions only to Republicans, he directed his Indian tribal clients to make millions of dollars in campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.

Records from the Federal Elections Commission and the Center for Public Integrity show that Abramoff's Indian clients contributed between 1999 and 2004 to 195 Republicans and 88 Democrats. The Post has copies of lists sent to tribes by Abramoff with specific directions on what members of Congress were to receive specific amounts."

Howell even offered up documents obtained by the Post to back her up. Not good enough for those upset with Howell – and the paper. It didn't take long for comments to come flooding in – none too supportive. Late this afternoon, Jim Brady, Executive Editor of Washingtonpost.com posted the following message:

"As of 4:15 p.m. ET today, we have shut off comments on this blog indefinitely.

At its inception, the purpose of this blog was to open a dialogue about this site, the events of the day, the journalism of The Washington Post Company and other related issues. Among the things that we knew would be part of that discussion would be the news and opinion coming from the pages of The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com. We knew a lot of that discussion would be critical in nature. And we were fine with that. Great journalism companies need feedback from readers to stay sharp.

But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being. It's a shame that it's come to this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about.

We're not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public dialogue with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to think more carefully about how we do it."

I've already weighed in on the substance of this debate (I think the inclusion of Democrats is accurate when discussing this scandal given what we know at this time). But this episode points to a potentially more disturbing and damaging problem for those interested in finding a way to break down some of the walls that have traditionally surrounded mainstream media outlets.

First off, I read a great many of the comments posted to Howell's clarification today -- not all of them, and certainly not ones the Post may have deleted before pulling the plug for good. What I saw was certainly aggressive criticism, some off base, some more on point. There were a lot of attacks on Howell's ability to be an ombudsman and on the paper for its reporting. And there were an awful lot of calls for Howell to resign or be fired over the issue. (It was clear that few of the commenters had a solid grasp of exactly what the role of an ombudsman is, or who Howell reports to). I didn't see any profanity, hate speech or explicitly personal attacks (again, I did not read them all). Nevertheless, the discussion was hardly one that could be considered respectful, or even civil.

This unfortunate chain of events leaves everyone in the new media landscape in worse position. The Post, laudably, was making an effort to engage readers in a dialogue – just what so many press reformers have clamored for. By closing that comment door, they've perhaps taken a step backward from trying to be more open in the future.

More than that, the news audience has been terribly served by a few loudmouths incapable of having a rational discussion. At a time when organizations like the Post, NBC News, CBS News (here at PE) and many, many others are opening themselves up to participation from the audience, those very consumers who wanted it failed at their end of the bargain today. Crude and crass attacks on the imagined motives and connections of the Post and Howell do not constitute a "dialogue," and certainly don't help the cause of those launching them.

Hopefully, the Post will once again open its blog up for comments. Hopefully, those who want to really participate in a conversation and argue their positions will go there and do just that. But if we see more repeats of today, I'm not sure we can really expect that to happen. Real dialogue, after all, is a two-way street.

Update: As stated above, I did not read the all the comments posted on post.blog and, in the many I did read, I saw no profanity, hate speech or personal attacks. Had I read them all, I would have been able to state that some those elements did exist in some of the comments. A Washington Post reporter provided Public Eye with screen shots of the comments that show that occurred in at least a dozen instances. These screen shots appear authentic and include comments I had previously seen, so I take them to be real.

As to why I may have not seen those posts originally, Brady updated post.blog this evening, stating:

"The reason that people were not routinely seeing the problematic posts I mentioned were that we were trying to remove them as fast as we could in order to preserve the reasoned arguments many others were making. We removed hundreds of these posts over the past few days, and it was becoming a significant burden on us to try and keep the comments area free of profanity and name-calling. So we eventually chose to turn off comments until we can come up with a better way to handle situations like this, where we have a significant amount of people who refuse to abide by the rules we set out."

Public Eye's policy on posting is to police our comments and remove any individual posts that we feel violate our rules of engagement. We feel this is the best way to try and facilitate a real discussion, and that is preferable to completely shutting out comments. This exchange relies on the ability of we here at PE to be honest, fair and accurate and for our readers to express themselves in a manner that approaches civility.

[peterbaldwin-2009]

Now comes the disclosure of 5 photos of Bush buddy-buddy with Abrimoff. CBS will certainly be aggressively reporting this new revelation and demand that the paddy-cake photos be published. Time to admit that CBS is on the Abimoff teat too.

[mikezwolf]

djman1141: You are clearly not "middle of the road", as you are repeating Free Republic talking points. For instance, that "UCLA" study has been thoroughly discredited (it's the one that says that the Drudge Report leans left... that pretty much says it all!) Howell has a track record of being on the right, as have Kurtz (heck, he's even married to a Republican politico), Schmidt, and almost every other reporter on the national politics beat at the Post. The Post hasn't been a left-of-center newspaper in a while now, certainly not in its national politics coverage or editorial page. And, like all wilfully blind movement-conservatives, you ignore the fundamentals of the case: 1) Abramoff, with Delay, Rove, etc., was part of the K Street Project, the goal of which was to cut off funding to the Democratic Party by any means, legal or illegal; 2) From all indications of its scale, this is the largest corruption scandal ever in Washington history; 2) Abramoff personally never gave a penny to Democrats; 3) The tribes who were extorted (with Ralph Reed doing the hitting, in a classical mob-style extortion racket) into becoming Abramoff clients and had previously been Democratic donors REDUCED their donations to Democrats; Abramoff directed his clients not to donate to Democrats (there is abundant direct evidence of him urging his clients not to donate to Democrats; there is not evidence of the contrary -- the little that was pointed to by the Post has been well refuted).

[djman1141]

The army of incensed leftist posters all over the WaPo sites keep repeating mantras that betray their delusional obsessions. In the light of the WaPo's past exaggerations and mis-statements that give a Democratic Party POV to almost every major issue that they address, it looks like the crazed hysterical language employed by lefty bloggers when the WaPo makes an occasional mis-statement in favor of a Republican POV betrays their entitlement mentality. Lies on the left are okay; but a slip-up favoring the right are not okay. The media is biased to the left, and the occasional tilt in the direction of balance ignites the fury of the agitprop crowd. These people would prefer the balance of Kim Jung-Il or Fidel Castro, or maybe the bounced socialist [you should read the Ba'athist platform!] Saddam Hussein. Or, of course, his Ba'ath political cousin Bashir Assad. The international left has a bad track record on "balance."

[djman1141]

The WaPo has a reputation in the past of being biased toward the Left and the three-year UCLA media bias study which you can read a summary of at http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6664 puts the Post in the left side of major publications. I signed up for a chat room at the Post a few months back and my MOR views were assaulted by a left-wing claque of obscenity-spewing posters who accused me of being paid by the RNC for expressing support for a couple of Republican initiatives. I was soon after accused of personal attacks, as my posting privileges were suspended. The chat room had been completely colonized by the left, and there was no room for alternate views.

[justmy2]

V Ververs: Real dialogue, after all, is a two-way street. That is interesting. Over the course of five days, please point out any communication from the Post other than one comment by Derek Willis. It sounds like you are only requesting a "dialogue" when it is convenient. Reading through this post, it leaves one with the impression that you are assisting in circling the wagons, as opposed to providing context. BTW-Do you find it interesting that you no one sent you a screen shot of the "hundreds" of deleted messages? In all of the other instances, the site was flooded with comments complaining that users messages were being deleted. Did you notice that this didn't occur on the post that Brady implies had "hundreds" of deleted comments. It is time to look in the mirror and determine if you are being sufficiently skeptical. As a professional journalist, you know you should be doing this. You are doing a very important service here. Please remember the tenets of journalism and I am sure you will continue doing a good job. However, I think you may need to take a step back and place yourself in the position of a non-journalist and think about whether you are looking at all points of view in a balanced manner.

[phoenixandy]

Vaughn, with all due respect, you're just repeating the same lie that Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell is pushing: "I think the inclusion of Democrats is accurate when discussing this scandal given what we know at this time." That, Vaughn, is a lie. The Democrats have received NOT ONE PENNY of any dirty money from Jack Abramoff. This lie is a smokescreen puffed up by Republicans to distract from the real issues. I also take offense that washingtonpost.com Editor Jim Brady claimed that the attacks against Ms. Howell came only from "the far left". It is not just "the far left" that's complaining. It's those who know what the truth is and Ms. Howell is refusing to accept the truth. She wants to make it look like both parties are equally affected by Abramoff, which is not true. I am also disgusted that Ms. Howell has chosen to play the victim like Samuel Alito's wife instead of taking personal responsibility for her actions. It is also an insult to Washington Post readers that she has refused to respond in a timely fashion and has told us to "wait" for her Sunday column. Unless she retracts her Republican-spin lies, she should either resign or be fired.

[dogmo1001]

It's too bad that the WP's ombudsman does not understand the basic tenets of journalistic accuracy and that managment appears to be willing to look the other way while she -- for whatever reasons -- significantly distorts the facts of the matter. She should resign.

[bobbyjoe81]

To show the extent of the problem with the way Howell ends that column, let's slightly rephrase her final words. First, the original ending, in Howell's own words: "So far, Schmidt and Grimaldi say their reporting on the investigations hasn't put Democrats in the first tier of people being investigated. But stay tuned. This story is nowhere near over." Now, let's merely change the players in those sentences. Mr. Ververs, tell me if you feel this would be an ethical way to end a column (by the way, the unfortunate "Mr. Jones" is entirely fictional): "So far, reporters say their investigations haven't connected Mr. Jones with the Mafia. But stay tuned. This story is nowhere near over." Or, how about this: "So far, reporters have found no evidence that Mr. Jones beats his wife. But stay tuned. This story is nowhere near over." Perhaps you begin to see the problem, and why the quote about how Abramoff directs contributions must also be viewed in the larger context?

[bobbyjoe81]

Dear Mr. Ververs, Aren't you leaving out some important context in your description of the blowup between Howell and those Post readers? It wasn't merely the content of Howell's statement, dubious as it may be, but also the tone of that column. When you look, for example, at the final words of her column about Abramoff, here's how Howell chose to leave things with her readers: "So far, Schmidt and Grimaldi say their reporting on the investigations hasn't put Democrats in the first tier of people being investigated. But stay tuned. This story is nowhere near over." Honest readers can argue all they'd like over how she phrases Abramoff "directing" contributions. But an honest reader would also have a difficult time justifying the insinuating tone of the column's final words. Taken as a whole, the column is troubling. It requires acrobatics to parse that last part as other than insinuating "Democrats aren't being investigated; but they will be." Here, Howell is certainly NOT offering "fact" dubious or otherwise; she's conjecturing, playing fortune-teller. Why? Even if readers, as you suggest, don't have an idea of what an ombudsman's job really is, I sincerely doubt "psychic" is part of the job description. Maybe, once again, it's poor phrasing. But that's an awful lot of "ill-phrased" statements in one column, is it not? Context should also be provided about the controversies with Howell's previous columns. The outrage didn't just pop up out of thin air.

[lexalexander]

Vaughn: I'll tell you the same thing I told Ms. Howell: Journalist to journalist, I think you're wrong, for all the reasons laid out by previous commenters. This isn't profane, and I hope it's civil.