Great, dataguy. thank you.

excellent, goethean. hopefully we can get some action here...

Actually, Howell has answered two of my emails, not substantively, but she answered them.

I think though that for this they'll hide behind the great fire wall that separates the news and opinion at WaPo. If they can after the, I think, more than one thousand comments posted on Will's editorial on line.

Here's mine:

Dear Ms. Howell:

At some level, it has to embarrass the Washington Post when your in-house columnists such as George Will rearrange facts to suit their biases. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The bigger problem is that you've got a stableful of overpaid and mostly worthless columnists on the op-ed page. They often write without having a layman's grasp of the facts of what they're writing about, they rarely bring fresh insights to the discussion, and they all too rarely call bullshit when the Administration is serving it up. Yet, at a time when your paper's news budget has been cut by $2 million, you continue to treat these columnists as a scarce resource deserving of lifetime tenure.

One thing the blogosphere has demonstrated is that there are certainly hundreds, probably thousands of Americans with at least as good a combination of writing and analytical skills, insight, and passion as the typical member of the New York Times or Washington Post op-ed rotation. News analysis and commentary, and the skills required for it, are NOT a scarce resource; they are abundant. Kevin Drum can run circles around Richard Cohen; Laura Rozen can do everything David Ignatius can. There are a plethora of econ-bloggers out there who actually know economics, an attribute that Robert J. Samuelson sorely lacks. In a town where legal proceedings routinely impact politics, a former prosecutor like Christy Hardin Smith might be able to help your readers sort out the issues. And all these people would likely produce columns for a fraction of the going rate for a Will, an Ignatius, a Mallaby, a Samuelson, a Cohen, an Applebaum.

There's a great opportunity here for the Washington Post to simultaneously produce a far more interesting and informative (and even more factual!) op-ed page, and substantially improve the bottom line. And at the same time, you might save the jobs of some of your reporters - and good reporters such as Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Barton Gellman still *are* a scarce resource, make no mistake about it.

Sincerely,
(RT)

is there a journalistic standard with regard to op/ed pages and ombudsmen? Because if there isn't, God knows the Washington Post would be a good place to implement one. Beyond Will's dishonesty in this case, if they're going to publish things like Richard Cohen's should-be-infamous reference to "therpeutic violence", they certainly owe their readers some sort of explanation of what the fuck that means (I promise to leave the "F"-bomb out of my note to old pearl clutchin' Debbie). Then we can move on to the intellectual dishonesty of Fred Hiatt, the batshit crazy rantings of Charles Krauthammer (does no one love this man enough to get him the help he needs?) and the snide adolescent sniping of Sebastian Mallaby, who once referred to a sitting US Senator and former presidential candidate as "John 'Benedict Arnold' Kerry".

Ombudsmen are, in principle and by definition, the readers' representative, right? not just to certain sections.

thanks, jalmari, you couldn't be more right. I hope that what we're saying has an effect, but I have my doubts...

Martinez: "Actually, I read George Will and he only had praise for Jim Webb."

Will: "Webb certainly has conveyed what he is: a boor. Never mind the patent disrespect for the presidency. Webb's more gross offense was calculated rudeness toward another human being -- one who, disregarding many hard things Webb had said about him during the campaign, asked a civil and caring question,"

Well I have nothing but praise for people with Mr. Martinez's reading skills. Oddly enough that praise can't be printed in a family paper. Were you reading a different column?

Well, I got it and appreciated it.

Someone needs to invent the cyber equivalent of "air quotes".  :-) 

aMike

Well, you spun your irony squarely on the razor's edge of fact and fiction - skillfully, I might add.  But consider our coffee shop metaphor here - the burning question is at what point in drinking a cup of coffee does the drug kick in and create a sense of alertness?  I was drinking a Costa Rican brew as I read your sarcasm and I think I was just then coming out of the fog of Slumberland.  Your line about what Will condones did in fact register, but I wasn't quite conscious enough for it to function.  Besides, our semantic skills are mightily bruised after 6 years of Republican upisdownism.  We must remain ever vigilant!

Neoboho

POX balance theory suggests that we want to balance our views of sources with our views of issues in such a way that we agree with highly regarded sources and disagree with disliked sources. Given Bush's approval ratings right now, the best thing that any politician can do is to get into a row with him and the worst thing would be to seem to agree with him.

Maybe that's why George Will is so upset about Democrats not treating Bush with proper civility--it's a winning strategy.

...P.S. Only halfway tongue in cheek here--the theory is real.

With so much good stuff, I'd thought I add mine too:

George Will is a syndicated columnist and a journalist of national significance. This is why it is disturbing to see him mucking with quotations to provide a disturbing alternate reality. I am sure I am not the first to notice--and likely point out to the Post--that Will's most recent column distorts facts and twists them to lead the readers to draw conclusions that are exactly the opposite of what actually transpired.

Will wrote:

When Bush asked Webb, whose son is a Marine in Iraq, "How's your boy?" Webb replied, "I'd like to get them [sic] out of Iraq." When the president again asked "How's your boy?" Webb replied, "That's between me and my boy."

Here's how The Hill described the same episode only yesterday:

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.

But even the Post had a version different from Will's in its own account (also yesterday):

"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq. "I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

If Will wants to narrowly focus on the word "them" in Webb's initial response, he surely should notice such small matter as Webb politely addressing George Bush as "Mr. President". Given that the Post has a second hand account to begin with, one also has to wonder how accurate the actual quotations are, but that's truly a small matter next to Will's main distortion. After all, if he is going to rely on the quotations as given, he better do so for the entire quotations.

Will opens his column with a diatribe attacking Jim Webb:

Washington has a way of quickly acculturating people, especially those who are most susceptible to derangement by the derivative dignity of office. But Jim Webb, Democratic senator-elect from Virginia, has become a pompous poseur and an abuser of the English language before actually becoming a senator.

Yet, what he offers as evidence is an intentional distortion of what transpired. When Webb's replies are read in context, it occurs to me--and likely thousands of other readers--that it is George Bush who is "a pompous poseur" and "a boor", not Jim Webb. For Will to complain of "Webb's ... calculated rudeness toward another human being" is highly hypocritical.

I usually disagree with Will on issues, but I used to respect him as a thinker and as a journalist. No longer! Will has fallen into the same trap that has previously been limited to talk radio and a few dozen TV pundits and a couple of over-the-mental-edge columnists like Charles Krauthammer. He gave more weight to his personal opinions and preferences than to facts.

Will is no Michael Richards, but I would like to see an apology from him for the smear job, the verbal assault he unleashed on the pages of American--and, indeed, international--newspapers. If Howard Kurtz has any sense, he will make note of this incident in his Media Notes and take Will to task for making up facts to fit his conclusions. But I am not holding my breath. After all, Jim Webb is an impertinent upstart and George Will is the stately wordsmith. It is my sincere wish that Americans could see through Will's distortions, but experience tell me that even if he were to apologize, the spin machine will cite the original distorted version and not the corrected one.