{"id":191276,"date":"2009-09-06T21:43:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-07T02:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/09\/06\/people-who-should-not-be-reporters\/"},"modified":"2009-09-06T21:43:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-07T02:43:00","slug":"people-who-should-not-be-reporters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/09\/06\/people-who-should-not-be-reporters\/","title":{"rendered":"People Who Should Not Be Reporters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2009\/09\/04\/AR2009090402967.html\">Monica Hesse of the <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Washington Post<\/span><\/a>, who went whining to their ombudsman.<\/p>\n<p>You see, she wrote a puff piece about homophobic bigot Brian Brown, a major lobbyist against gay civil rights, and  &#8220;<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">The day before returning <\/span><span>[from her vacation]<\/span><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">, she logged on to check e-mails &#8212; and wept.<\/span>&#8220;<\/p>\n<p>She wrote a puff piece, in the best tradition of <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Post<\/span> writers being played by right wing blow-hards, and she crossed a line, and <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">real<\/span> people, as opposed to the right wing rent-a-crowd, took offense.<\/p>\n<p>She was assigned the piece, and <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">wrote it in order to ensure that she would not get irate email<\/span>, and was crushed when she got irate email.<\/p>\n<p>Notwithstanding her professed bisexuality, at least as related to the ombudsman, her problem is <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">not<\/span> her position on gay marriage, nor is it that she wrote a puff piece.<\/p>\n<p>Her problem is that she clearly wrote this article to avoid confrontation, and when she got confrontation anyway, &#8220;she wept.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She is in the wrong line of work.  A journalist has to believe that irate letters are a mark of honor.<\/p>\n<p>H\/t <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eschatonblog.com\/2009\/09\/shorter-wapo-ombudsman.html\">Atrios<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Monica Hesse of the Washington Post, who went whining to their ombudsman. You see, she wrote a puff piece about homophobic bigot Brian Brown, a major lobbyist against gay civil rights, and &#8220;The day before returning [from her vacation], she logged on to check e-mails &#8212; and wept.&#8220; She wrote a puff piece, in the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[974,1129,1064,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hack-journalism","category-journalism","category-media","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}