I had meant to write about this this weekend. And in the intervening time a number of others have touched on several of the key points. So let me just touch on one point about Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell’s piece this week on the Post’s “good leak” editorial.
The point of Howell’s column, you’ll remember, was to explain the night and day contradiction between a post editorial and news article on the Libby leaks story, which appeared on the same day. Were Libby’s leaks ‘good leaks’ meant to inform the public about key facts leading up to the beginning of the Iraq war or were they intentionally misleading leaks intended to damage and silence a critic?
Much of Howell’s piece focused on the standard explanation that most legitimate papers keep a high wall of separation between their news and opinion pages. Neither side tries to force its head on the other, etc. That’s correct. Most everyone who’s familiar with the newspaper business knows that. And, in this case, it’s largely beside the point.
The issue with this startling juxtaposition of what appeared on the Post’s news and editorial pages was not that the two disagreed with each other. From different directions we’ve been seeing that on foreign policy in the Post and the Times for three or four years. The problem was that the Post’s editorial page seemed to be contradicting the facts as clearly as they can possibly be known. The fact that the Post’s news pages published the contradictory information on the very same day highlighted the problem — but it was not in itself the problem.
There’s one passage in Howell’s column which seems to highlight the flawed thinking.
“Editorials and news stories have different purposes,” she wrote. “News stories are to inform; editorials are to influence.”
Out of context we might figure this was just sloppiness of phrasing. But I think it demonstrates misunderstanding. The point of an editorial is to influence WITH FACTS. Connecting readers up with actual facts, what’s actually happening isn’t something the editorial pages leave in the hands of the news department. It’s their job too. This is what opinion journalism is about — whether on editorial pages or magazines of opinion or blogs. It’s what opinion journalists do. They argue for what the facts mean, how differents facts relate to each other, how some don’t.
This is all another way of saying that editorial writers come to the canvass with much of the paint already applied. They can’t make up their own facts just because they’re helpful to the storyline.
That of course is not to say that editorialists and opinion columnists don’t make up their own facts all the time. But that’s not how it’s supposed to work. And that’s why people were upset with what they saw.
