WAPO TRIUMPHS – AT 10:29 A.M. ET:  I'm glad to see that Ronald Kessler, at the conservative NewsMax site, is giving the Washington Post the credit it deserves for improving its product.  (We give credit where it's due here.) 

For years the Post was in steady decline, acting as a junior partner to The New York Times in trying to be a liberal mouthpiece, and not only on its editorial pages.  But, under a refreshingly new management, it is returning to its earlier tradition as a fair and balanced newspaper.  There is still a way to go – a culture dies hard – but the progress is clear.  There is no similar progress at The Times, and there probably won't be until the current publisher is forced to walk the plank or goes through a religious conversion.

Kessler praises WaPo for a stinging editorial debunking a new, leftist Hollywood movie (Is there any other kind?) on the Valerie Plame affair:

Saying the movie is “full of distortions — not to mention outright inventions,” the Dec. 3 editorial refutes the claim by former State Department diplomat Joe Wilson, Plame’s husband, that he “debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger.”

In fact, the editorial says, an investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that Wilson’s reporting “did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.”

The editorial slams the couple’s story that Plame’s exposure as a CIA operative was the result of a White House conspiracy.

“A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy — but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative,” the editorial says.

The editorial notes that the film’s reception illustrates a troubling trend in political debates in Washington, where “established facts are willfully ignored.”

COMMENT:  One reason they're ignored is that too many journalists attended colleges where they were taught that "there's no such thing as truth," that it's just a "cultural construct."  Lies are too often called "alternative narratives."  It is an Orwellian universe. 

The Washington Post is, today, a better paper than The Times, and its editorial page is vastly superior.  Changes in leadership, like changes of command in the military, can produce dramatic results.  And sometimes the results are heartening.

December 10, 2010