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Ombud Distress

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Everyone’s in a big tizzy about OmbudAndy’s capitulation to the New Black Panther Party scandal machine in his column this weekend.

Thursday’s Post reported about a growing controversy over the Justice Department’s decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party. The story succinctly summarized the issues but left many readers with a question: What took you so long?

For months, readers have contacted the ombudsman wondering why The Post hasn’t been covering the case. The calls increased recently after competitors such as the New York Times and the Associated Press wrote stories. Fox News and right-wing bloggers have been pumping the story. Liberal bloggers have countered, accusing them of trying to manufacture a scandal.

But The Post has been virtually silent.

[snip]

The Post should never base coverage decisions on ideology, nor should it feel obligated to order stories simply because of blogosphere chatter from the right or the left.

But in this case, coverage is justified because it’s a controversy that screams for clarity that The Post should provide. If Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and his department are not colorblind in enforcing civil rights laws, they should be nailed. If the Commission on Civil Rights’ investigation is purely partisan, that should be revealed. If Adams is pursuing a right-wing agenda, he should be exposed.

National Editor Kevin Merida, who termed the controversy “significant,” said he wished The Post had written about it sooner. The delay was a result of limited staffing and a heavy volume of other news on the Justice Department beat, he said.

Better late than never. There’s plenty left to explore.

Perhaps the best of many judicious rants about this capitulation comes from Joan Walsh:

The always smart Adam Serwer, writing for the American Prospect, called Friday “The Day The Controversy Over The New Black Panther Case Fell Apart.” He credited Politico’s interview with conservative Civil Rights Commission vice chair Abigail Thernstrom, who says her GOP commission colleagues and the right-wing media have tried to use the “small potatoes” story of alleged voter intimidation by the “New Black Panther Party” to “topple” the Obama administration, as well as other developments undermining the claims of former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams, the main right-winger hyping this case in the right-wing media, particularly Fox News and the Washington Times.

But right on time, Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander chimes in to keep the specious story alive, chiding his paper for ignoring it while valiant journalists like Fox’s Megyn Kelly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh fought to bring light to the darkness.

[snip]

It’s the job of editors at big papers like the Post to expose those lies, and the movement behind them – not to flagellate themselves for not saying “How high?” when right-wing media watchdogs say “Jump!” Andrew Alexander botched his job today.

Thing is, it’s not just that OmbudAndy is not doing his job. Nor is it the odd way he seems to be channeling his predecessor, Debbie Howell, in her most craven days.

It’s the way this capitulation almost exactly mirrors that of WaPo’s rival this March, when NYT’s Clark Hoyt published a similar mea culpa about not covering the manufactured scandal about ACORN.

THE Times reported Saturday that Acorn, once considered the nation’s largest community organizing group for the poor and powerless, is on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. It has already ceased operating in many states, including Maryland, where two conservative activists pretending to be a pimp and a prostitute used a hidden camera and recorded Acorn employees advising them on how to conceal the source of illegal income and manage 14-year-old Salvadoran prostitutes in the country illegally: “Train them to keep their mouth shut.”

The Times was slow last fall to cover that sting in Baltimore, similar ones at Acorn offices in Brooklyn, Washington and other cities, and the resulting uproar, including criminal investigations and votes in Congress to cut off funds for the group. But the paper finally described how a succession of Acorn employees had advised the pair on obviously improper activities and how, as a result, many of the group’s allies had deserted it. Now Acorn and its supporters say The Times got the story wrong and, by failing to correct it, has played into the hands of a campaign that has pushed the group near extinction.

Both apologized for the correct reporting their journalists had done the previous year. Both appeared to bow to sheer volume of calls rather than a real assessment of evidence. And both promised–at a moment when any doubt the right wing scandal machine was simply blowing hot air–to make amends for not sufficiently doing what the scandal mongers expected.

(And in doing both, it should be said, made their papers the vehicle of racist fear-mongering.)

This is not just individual ombuds having a bad day discerning facts from right wing scandal-mongering. It is becoming institutional, such that our leading newspapers’ idea of policing their own content is simply capitulating to the right wing every time their scandals prove to be completely discredited.

The Danger of Losing Beat Reporters: The ACORN Hoax

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Go read this E&P article analyzing how right wing’s noise machine managed to plant a particular narrative about ACORN in the traditional press. (h/t Susie) The whole thing is good–relying on data and interviews with individual reporters. But I want to draw attention to a detail the report doesn’t make explicit: that the reporters who proved immune to the right wing noise machine were, for the most part, beat reporters. Here are the descriptions of the reporters E&P singles out for praise:

One of the rare reporters who does cover community organizing is National Public Radio’s Pam Fessler. Fessler was perhaps the best qualified reporter in the country to report on the allegations of voter fraud. Her beat includes poverty, philanthropy, and nonprofit groups, and she has also covered voting issues since 2000. Her NPR reports were the best fact-checked of all of the reports we studied.

Fessler was familiar with ACORN and complaints about its voter registration work long before the 2008 election. “Since I’ve been covering voting issues, ACORN has been popping up as an issue almost every election.” ACORN’s notoriety at election time, she said, is because the organization has been a “target by Republicans across the country and some local election officials.” Based in Washington, Fessler was aware that the Republican National Committee had spotlighted the voter fraud issue, particularly as Election Day 2008 neared. “The RNC started holding these phone conference calls almost daily when they were specifically targeting ACORN.” The RNC sent out almost daily releases on the topic as well.

[snip]

Kevin Diaz is the Washington correspondent for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He started as a metro reporter at the newspaper in 1984, and has been based in D.C. since 1999. Diaz is familiar with what ACORN does, and said their operations are “pretty robust in the Twin Cities.” The allegations of voter fraud came to his attention as he was covering the presidential election. Although most of the attacks were national, Diaz said that some Minnesota Republicans were on the offensive against ACORN, particularly Mary Kiffmeyer, a former Minnesota Secretary of State, and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Because there had been some irregularities in Minneapolis-St. Paul in past elections, and because he “thought this would be a tight race,” Diaz decided to look into the allegations. After his investigation, Diaz reported on his findings published in a front-page Oct. 24, 2008 story.

“Yes, there had been a track record of voter registration fraud, but that’s different from voter fraud,” Diaz said. Diaz also had a different explanation for the source of the voter registration fraud. “The irregularities were perpetrated against ACORN, not by ACORN,” Diaz said,

[snip]

Joe Guillen, a metro reporter at the [Cleveland] Plain Dealer since 2004, wrote his first story about ACORN and voter registration problems before it became a national story and organizations like Fox News and the New York Post visited Cleveland. “I was covering the Board of Elections – it was part of my beat. I went to every board meeting.” That’s where Guillen first heard of problems. “A woman in the registration department told the Board that there had been a problem with a batch of voter registration cards.” The problems included registration cards filled out by multiple people and some cards with transposed addresses. At that point, they were still in the process of finding how much ACORN registration workers were involved in the problems.

In his reporting, Guillen stayed in touch with Cleveland ACORN representatives and their superiors, as well as the members and staff of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

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