The Washington Post ran a story in their “Wonkblog” section on March 20th that drew a lot of criticism for its hackery. Here’s a quick summary of what happened: A couple of “journalists” – one with a clear conflict of interest that wasn’t disclosed to readers – did a hack job on the Koch brothers. They were called out. They doubled down. And they were called out again.
John Hinderaker over at Powerline did the heavy lifting highlighting the issues with the story and the author’s conflict of interest in two articles. Here and here. Needless to say, you should read both in their entirety. As someone on Twitter said to me, there have been nuclear bomb tests that left less devastation than John’s articles.
I’ll quote from the second piece here to make a point about how deceitful Washington Post’s “Wonkblog” – which is billed as an economics and domestic policy blog, not the left leaning advocacy blog which it actually is – was in green-lighting the article and publishing the “defense” of the article after getting reamed by Hinderaker.
So we have a contrast that couldn’t be clearer: the Washington Post published a false story about support for Keystone because it fit the Democratic Party’s agenda. It covered up a similar, but true story about opposition to the pipeline (and about “green” politics in general) because that, too, fit the Democratic Party’s agenda. I don’t think we need to look any further to connect the dots.
And yet, a still deeper level of corruption is on display here. Juliet Eilperin is a reporter for the Washington Post who covers, among other things, environmental politics. As I wrote in my prior post, she is married to Andrew Light. Light writes on climate policy for the Center for American Progress, a far-left organization that has carried on a years-long vendetta against Charles and David Koch on its web site, Think Progress. Light is also a member of the Obama administration, as Senior Adviser to the Special Envoy on Climate Change in the Department of State. The Center for American Progress is headed by John Podesta, who chaired Barack Obama’s transition team and is now listed as a “special advisor” to the Obama administration. Note that Ms. Eilperin quoted Podesta, her husband’s boss, in her puff piece on Tom Steyer.
Oh, yes–one more thing. Guess who sits on the board of the Center for American Progress? Yup. Tom Steyer.
Now let’s stroll over to the Washington Posts “Standards and Ethics” to see just how unethical the Washington Post was, shall we? We’ll focus on the last paragraph of Section A: Conflict of Interest.
We avoid active involvement in any partisan causes – politics, community affairs, social action, demonstrations – that could compromise or seem to compromise our ability to report and edit fairly. Relatives cannot fairly be made subject to Post rules, but it should be recognized that their employment or their involvement in causes can at least appear to compromise our integrity. The business and professional ties of traditional family members or other members of your household must be disclosed to department heads.
Since one of the authors of the Washington Post article, as highlighted by Powerline, is married to someone who works at Center for American Progress as a climate policy analyst / writer, and has advised the White House on climate policy, there is a strong appearance of impropriety here.
As such, there are two possibilities: Either Juliet Eilperin, the wife of the CAP climate policy writer, failed to disclose this fact to her department heads, or she disclosed it and the department heads chose not to tell their readers about it. Someone at the Washington Post chose not to tell readers that one of the authors of an error riddled article has a conflict of interest.
Which brings up another section of the Washington Post’s Standards and Ethics: F. Fairness:
No story is fair if it omits facts of major importance or significance. Fairness includes completeness.
Why hasn’t the Washington Post retracted the entire article yet?