Washington Post admits coverage tilted to Obama, doesn't admit their incredibly biased coverage for him and their lies for him

Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell offers "An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage" (link). Unfortunately, about the only "tilt" she admits to is in the amount of coverage. She almost completely ignores the fact that the Washington Post served as little more than an arm of the Obama campaign by lying and misleading on his behalf and by serving as the source for and amplifier of smears. About the only thing beyond amount of coverage she'll admit to is a failure to cover some things:

But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

Not too many people were up in arms about wanting to know more about the last sentence, since they were many things about his past that are much more important to know. I strongly suspect that Howell included the last sentence as a way to trivialize the concerns of the WaPo's critics.

Howell calls out a few of their reporters for acclaim, but completely fails to note any of those who intentionally got it wrong. None of that should be any surprise; as discussed at the first link back in March, Howell couldn't find much of anything wrong with the WaPo's incredibly biased immigration coverage either. Howell is simply a hack, paid to cover things up and give a starting point to "media critics" who'll give a feather-weight slap on the wrist to the MSM.

The following are some of the stories I've noted here. For even more, look through Digg's archives for front page stories from the WaPo that were later marked as inaccurate.

* Dana Milbank/WaPo's dangerous smear of Sarah Palin, supporters. In May, Milbank misled about Obama's links.

* Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post served as an amplifier for the NYT's 10/4/08 attempted cover-up of Bill Ayers.

* Howell praises Washington Post's "fact checker" Michael Dobbs; he "deserves praise for parsing campaign rhetoric for the overblown or just flat wrong". Now see this for just one of the examples of things he appears to have got wrong. Another thing he got wrong is in "McCain's 'Education' Spot Is Dishonest, Deceptive" (link); see the discussion here.

* Shailagh Murray offers WaPo's lightest weight coverage of Barack Obama yet?

* Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post promoted a BHO campaign ad without noting that it took a John McCain quote out of context; Howard Kurtz of the WaPo also failed to note the full context for the quote.

* Ed O'Keefe earlier helped Obama spread lies about Rush Limbaugh when he promoted a BHO campaign video and didn't point out the incredibly obvious lies; for an example of how bad it was, even Joe Klein eventually came out against the ad.

* Anne Kornblut solicited tough questions for Sarah Palin, but as far as I was able to determine when she had the chance she didn't ask BHO anything of note. In at least one case she simply acted as a transcriptionist for BHO; one of her articles misled about Palin's stance on Iraq and was later silently corrected by the WaPo.

* "Peter Slevin Award for Mainstream Media Puffery" is won by Slevin himself.

* Paul Kane started a smear about Sarah Palin "slashing" funds for a program, when in fact they were simply less than the legislature had asked for; the funding was actually increased from the previous year.

* Eli Saslow/WaPo lied in support of Barack Obama

Politics · Sat, 11/08/2008 - 11:24 · · Importance: 19