AN ADMISSION - AT 7:24 P.M. ET:  It isn't often that the mainstream liberal press admits a mistake, so we acknowledge an excellent critique by Washington Post ombudsman (or is it ombudsperson, or ombudshuman), as reported by NewsMax:

Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander acknowledges that his newspaper doesn’t give enough credit to conservative media.

“Fox News, joined by right-leaning talk radio and bloggers, often hypes stories to apocalyptic proportions while casting competitors as too liberal or too lazy to report the truth,” he wrote in the paper Sunday.

“But they're also occasionally pumping legitimate stories. I thought that was the case with ACORN and, before it, the Fox-fueled controversy that led to the resignation of White House environmental adviser Van Jones.”

Alexander points out that “Jones had issued two public apologies before The Post finally wrote about him. … Conservatives had attacked Jones for more than a week before the first Post story appeared Sept. 5. He resigned the next day.”

The Post also was slow on the ACRON scandal, Alexander admits. “The Post wrote about it two days after the first of several explosive hidden-camera videos were aired showing the group's employees giving tax advice to young conservative activists posing as a prostitute and her pimp.

“Three days passed before The Post ran a short Associated Press story about the Senate halting Housing and Urban Development grants to ACORN. … But by that time, the Census Bureau had severed ties with ACORN. State and city investigations had been launched. It wasn't until late in the week that The Post weighed in with two solid pieces.”

COMMENT:  The Post has been, in recent years, one of the more thoughtful liberal papers, and its editorial page is fiercely independent.  Unlike The New York Times, which follows the liberal line wherever it leads, the Post will sometimes differ.  More power to the editors.

Will critiques like this improve things?  At the Post, a guarded maybe.  Elsewhere?  I don't think so.  The ideological problems in journalism may well be generational, requiring a new generation of writers who are not stuck in the culture wars of the 1960s.  Success is not guaranteed.

September 21,  2009