The Washington Post‘s decision this past Monday to part with its top editor has prompted quite the tempest in the paper’s newsroom. (Here’s a detailed account.) So many questions were fired by staff at the new boss(es): Why were outsiders chosen to replace her? Why were white males chosen? What commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion would the new regime make?
Heating matters up have been reports that the paper’s new-ish publisher, Will Lewis, who made these personnel decisions, helped cover up evidence of a British media phone-hacking scandal a decade ago.
But to me, the staff’s evident priorities are what’s most important – and most disturbing. For from all accounts, it seems that the most important question of all surrounding the Post’s future – at least from a reader’s standpoint – was completely ignored: Will the new team bring Journalism 101 practices back to the newsroom?
By that term, I don’t mean correcting the paper’s thickly encrusted biases – both ideological (notably its economic neoliberalism and its national security globalism) and social (especially its dogged glorification of all folks and institutions elitist, and its headlong plunge – as suggested above – into identity politics). Instead, I mean following the most fundamental nuts-and-bolts of reporting and editing. As no fewer than three items within two days alone this past week make clear, a back-to-basics approach can’t be restored soon enough.
Item Number One: A piece by Ellie Silverman and Jenny Gathright on immigrant reactions to a new District of Columbia law enabling non-citizens to vote in local elections. Given the sharp rise in Americans’ concerns about the Biden administration’s failure to control migrant flows across the U.S.’ southern border, it’s definitely an important subject. I’ve written about similar moves in the Maryland suburb of D.C. where I live. (See, e.g., here.)
We do learn from Silverman and Gathright have noted that this franchise has been given to District residents “if they are at least 18 years old as of Election Day, have been a D.C. resident for at least 30 days before the election, have not been deemed by a court legally incompetent to vote and are not claiming the right to vote in any state, territory, or country.”
But although they danced around the edges of the matter, the two reporters never explicitly addressed the question of whether D.C. has extended the right to vote to migrants in the country illegally. That’s the case in my hometown and several other municipalities in the state and around the country. And since their editors were evidently asleep at the switch as well, readers still have no idea of whether newcomers who have broken the law and who have never been held accountable are being permitted to participate in America’s (rule-of-law-based) democracy.
Item Number Two: An article by Erin Cox and Latheshia Beachum on the U.S. Senate campaign of Prince George’s County, Maryland County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks . (Prince George’s is my home county.) I was sailing through the report with no problem until the last paragraph, which reads:
“On the campaign trail, Alsobrooks has frequently spoken about changing gun laws and about gun violence’s effect on her family. Her great-grandfather was shot to death by a White sheriff’s deputy in South Carolina in the 1950s….”
There’s no doubting that Alsobrooks has been deeply, and understandably, affected by this incident, and it’s only human to try to relate events with personal, private impact to public issues.
But what on earth does the shooting death of her great-grandfather have to do with gun laws or gun violence per se? The shooter, after all, was a law enforcement officer. Given the year and location of the killing, it’s by all means possible that racism motivated the deputy (of course, in the absence of further detail, he deserves the same presumption of innocence we all do). But can there be any question that he possessed the gun lawfully? Is Alsobrooks suggesting that police shouldn’t carry guns? Is this what Cox and Beachum – and their editors – mean to convey?
If so, all any reasonable person can say is “Yikes!” Again, it’s plausible that the shooting was an act of racism. It’s completely implausible that it represented an example of “gun violence” or a failure of gun laws.
Item Number Three revolves around guns issues, too – a story on Wednesday on two tragic incidents in Prince George’s County and its Maryland neighbor, Montgomery, in which young children accidentally shot themselves. (Thankfully, both have survived as of this writing.)
According to correspondents Dan Morse and Jasmine Hilton, “The cases highlight two alarming public safety trends nationwide that worry gun safety experts and police: the soaring pervasiveness of homemade, untraceable weapons known as ghost guns and the increase in unintentional shootings by children.”
Read further into the article, however, and it’s easy to conclude that neither the main problem nor the only problem even in these cases is another alleged failure of gun control – the proliferation of “ghost guns.” Actually, it looks like the kind of gang violence all too common in too many big metro areas. Why do I say that?
In one of the instances, the Post tells us, the gun involved belonged to a relative of the child who “was on home confinement while facing murder charges in the District, according to court documents” and had been charged “with multiple weapons offenses in Maryland, including illegally possessing the gun and leaving it unsecured….”
In the other, the alleged perp is “a 15-year-old, who did not live in the apartment” who was charged “with possessing ammunition by a prohibited person.”
And therefore, isn’t it at least possible that in both cases, guns are only terrible symptoms of the real crisis – the great number of individuals caught up in nothing less than a deep-rooted culture of violence and lawlessness, which prominently includes a major shortage of serious adult supervision for juveniles? Isn’t this at least as plausible, and worthy of mention, as the article’s focus on “two alarming public safety trends nationwide that worry gun safety experts and police: the soaring pervasiveness of homemade, untraceable weapons known as ghost guns and the increase in unintentional shootings by children”?
Moreover, weirdly – and in a classic example of the aforementioned reportorial and editorial incompetence – this possibility was mentioned. Indeed, the reader eventually finds out that “unintentional shootings by juveniles remain relatively rare.” They’ve apparently increased from a miniscule 340 in 2015 (in a country of 330-plus million) to a slightly less miniscule 411 last year.
At the aforementioned staff meeting, new-ish Post publisher Will Lewis told his employees “We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it: it needs turning around. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience is halved. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Here’s hoping he – or some Post executive – recognizes before too long that the paper’s fortunes likely won’t rebound until it doesn’t leave readers hopelessly confused about its content.
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