A Town Meeting, a Tape and Terror
Press Action
Saturday, February 15, 2003
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand02152003/
Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler agrees with me that the Post erred in not sending a news reporter to cover Monday’s Town Hall meeting on Iraq organized by Rep. Jim Moran. I wrote to Getler this week, arguing that once again “the Metro section has shown substandard news judgment by choosing to ignore an important event in Alexandria.” He sent an email reply, saying: “Thanks, again. They should have had a reporter there, in my opinion. Courtland did write about it, but with a columnist’s approach.”
In my letter to Getler, I also wrote: “On Monday night, Congressman Jim Moran convened a town hall meeting at an Alexandria elementary school to allow his constituents an opportunity to voice their concerns and pose questions to him and to two Pentagon representatives. Hundreds of concerned citizens showed up for this important event, forcing the elementary school to open an overflow room where attendees could watch the event on closed-circuit monitors. Local television stations covered the event as did the British Broadcasting Company and C-Span. The Post, on the other hand, did not send a reporter to cover this event. This is disgraceful.”
In his weekly column in the Post’s Feb. 16 Outlook section, Getler writes: “On Monday night, an overflow crowd of 600 people jammed into an elementary school in Alexandria for a town meeting on war policy set up by Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and featuring the Pentagon’s top spokesperson, Assistant Secretary of Defense Victoria Clarke, and the assistant deputy commandant of the Marine Corps, Maj. Gen. Kevin Kuklok. The BBC covered the event, along with C-SPAN, the Los Angeles Times and other media, but there were no Washington Post reporters there. Post columnist Courtland Milloy, who often goes where reporters don’t, was there and wrote about the event in Wednesday’s paper. His column, of course, had a point of view. If you wanted to read a reportorial account — and an excellent example of how a story that some editors might view as routine and easy to skip can be turned into a fine news feature — you could look at the Los Angeles Times, which put reporter David Lamb’s piece on the front page. Post readers, properly in my view, complained of ‘substandard news judgment’ by the Metro section in failing to cover the meeting, as one put it.”
This proves that if you write a letter to ombudsman Getler that isn’t too caustic, he might listen to your complaint about the Post’s coverage and might use a quote from your comments in his Sunday column. In the end, I don’t know if his column ever has an impact on the conduct of the Post’s news staff. But at least he’s an ombudsman that’s willing to listen to certain arguments.
This is the second time in a month that Getler has quoted letters that I’ve sent to him. In January, he noted that the Post had failed to provide adequate coverage of the death of Charles Monroe, the board chairman of Arlington County, where I live.
In the same Feb. 16 column, though, Getler sympathizes with readers who had complained about what they perceived as an “anti-Israel bias” in recent articles published by the Post. These readers apparently think that any coverage of an Israeli attack on a U.S. navy ship or of the terrible plight of the Palestinians is “anti-Israel.” That type of feedback is nothing new for apologists of Israeli apartheid.
In his sympathetic response to those who criticized a Post article about an Israeli military incursion into the Gaza Strip, Getler says: “On balance, I thought the article was powerful and informative, but it had a serious flaw that could have been easily fixed. It took 14 long paragraphs describing the Palestinians’ grief and how they are outgunned before it explained that the Israeli mission was to destroy car repair shops and metal foundries, which the Israelis said produce mortars and missiles to be fired at Israeli soldiers, settlements in Gaza and nearby communities in Israel.”
-- Mark Hand