{"id":193784,"date":"2008-11-18T00:04:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-18T05:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/11\/18\/start-by-firing-deborah-howell\/"},"modified":"2008-11-18T00:04:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-18T05:04:00","slug":"start-by-firing-deborah-howell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/11\/18\/start-by-firing-deborah-howell\/","title":{"rendered":"Start by Firing Deborah Howell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Washington Post<\/span> has a problem with reality.<\/p>\n<p>While its news gathering operation is pretty good, its editorial outlook, which seems to be in a <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">constant<\/span> state of apology for having uncovered Watergate, seems to have no recognition of reality or truth<\/p>\n<p>This is a problem, because truth, not balance, should be the goal of a journalistic enterprise.<\/p>\n<p>Case in point, Ombudsman Deborah Howell, who is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2008\/11\/14\/AR2008111403057.html\">calling for political affirmative action in the news room<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>She is calling for wingnut welfare (affirmative action), and this is wrong for a number of reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> She is implying that women and minorities were <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">only<\/span> hired because of affirmative action,<\/li>\n<li> She is calling for the hiring of<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> unqualified<\/span>  conservatives.<\/li>\n<li> She is asking editors to <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">vet new hires on their politics<\/span> rather than their professionalism.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I have no clue what Ms. Howell does for a living, but it does<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> not <\/span>appear to be journalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Washington Post has a problem with reality. While its news gathering operation is pretty good, its editorial outlook, which seems to be in a constant state of apology for having uncovered Watergate, seems to have no recognition of reality or truth This is a problem, because truth, not balance, should be the goal of &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1064,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193784"}],"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=193784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}