Washington Post Articles Editorials

Saturday’s Washington Post has even more editorializing in news articles, or at least articles that appear in the news section, than usual.

Maybe someone has already complained about this, for the head on one of the examples is different online from the print edition. The headline on one of the lead articles in this morning’s print edition (above the fold, left column) is “Bush’s ‘Vision’ For Space Clouded – [subhead follows] Questions, Doubts Mount in Congress.” Now maybe Bush’s “vision” is “clouded,” but I would think the role of a news article is to report the views of those who believe so rather than to announce that conclusion in the paper’s voice in the headline. Someone else must have thought so, too, for the article in the online edition appears under the following head – subhead: “Bush’s Space Initiative Stalled – Questions, Doubts Mount In Congress.”

But wait; there’s more. A Jim VandeHei article on page A6 runs under the head – subhead “Kerry Struggles On Iraq Issue – Democrat Isn’t Presenting a Sharp Contrast With Bush.” (This time the online version has the same head, and this article, in fairness, is at least labeled “Analysis.”) This implies that Kerry should be presenting a sharp contrast, that if he did so he would be succeeding and not struggling. This implication of the head is amply confirmed by the lead paragraph:

FULTON, Mo., April 30 — Despite President Bush’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction and end the bloodshed in Iraq, John F. Kerry is struggling to present himself as a stronger foreign policy leader who offers voters an exit strategy significantly different from the president’s.

In other words, this “analysis” suggests, Bush is clearly a failure, and if Kerry weren’t such a bumbler he would be contrasting himself with Bush more sharply.

Really? I suspect Kerry has access to focus group and survey results that are better than VandeHei’s intuition and that reveal that a sharp contrast to Bush’s Iraq policies would be a loser. I would have no problem with VandeHei presenting the views of other analysts or Democratic pols who share this view, but, despite the “Analysis” label, this looks like a news story.

Even more objectionable, however, is an interpretation in the article that Vandehei presents as fact. Kerry, he writes,

voted against going to war in 1991, then supported President Bill Clinton’s tough approach with Saddam Hussein in 1997 and voted to authorize this war only to emerge as a critic of it. Kerry offers a nuanced position that is hard to explain in sound bites or short TV ads.

One could, of course, describe Kerry’s shifting Iraq position(s) as “nuanced.” Or, believing that he changes his tune whenever he thinks a different melody will play to his advantage, one could describe it/them as shifty, perfidious, contradictory, unprincipled, equivocating, erratic, capricious, duplicitous, straddling, shilly-shallying, self-interested, etc. Choosing “nuanced” over any of these unprincipled flip-flopping alternatives isn’t “analysis”; it’s opinion.

If a senior political reporter, especially one writing for a newspaper as influential as the Washington Post, feels the need to describe the apparent contradictions of a candidate for president as “nuanced,” he should feel free to do so … but in the editorial or OpEd pages.

UPDATE [5/2/04]

The New York Times has a similar article today, by Adam Nagourney, under the head “Kerry Struggling to Find a Theme, Democrats Fear.”

I wonder if they fear the struggling, or that he’ll actually succeed in finding one.