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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 8/15/2005 11:00:28 AM
Title: WP should admit it's wrong re Freedom March
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From MATT MENDELSOHN: Wow, how time flies. It was just a little over a year ago that we were snickering about some confused Illinois TV reporter who thought it appropriate to sign a Ronald Reagan tribute book, while on assignment covering a Ronald Reagan tribute. (And let's not forget the fun part: she sicced the police on a member of the public who had the gaul to question, in that same tribute book, President Reagan's record on AIDS.) Part of what made that story as comic as it was sad was how small market it all seemed. The reporter in question actually said in defense of her self-deputizing heroism, "Oh my gosh. He totally defamed Ronald Reagan about having no stand on the AIDS situation and HIV and all that."

Well, the Washington Post isn't small market and its contributing sponsorship of a Pentagon march (on 9/11, of all days) doesn't have a humorous underbelly. We're not talking about sponsoring bobblehead night at the local AAA ballpark. There's a war going on -- the Pentagon is in the midst of waging it and the Post is in the midst of covering it. That ought to be enough to cancel out any seemingly benign sponsorship deal dreamed up outside of the newsroom. Certainly you can go deeper and consider things like the fact that the war doesn't seem to be going so well, or, say, that there appears to be yet another attempt here to connect the events of 9/11 with the war in Iraq, or even why an event called "Freedom March" requires participants to register their names with the Pentagon, but there's no need to. The first argument should suffice.

Washington Post publisher Bo Jones told E&P, "If it turns out to be a political event, we would disassociate ourselves from it." How are you going to swing that? Are you going to take the banners down mid-event? His words were echoed by Post spokesman Eric Grant, who said, "The walk was never presented to us as a rally to support the war and we would be very disappointed if it took that approach." Well, here's some due diligence: the headlining act of this upcoming affair is a faded country star who got himself back into the news with a song called "I Raq and Roll." The song manages, in one fell swoop, to deride anti-war protesters, glorify the use of smart bombs in Iraq, and make Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The U.S.A." actually seem complex. So much for the no-connection-to-the-war argument and so much for a dignified tribute to the victims of 9/11.

Jim Farley, vice president for news at WTOP, another contributing sponsor of the march, defended his station's support by saying, "They're supporting American troops worldwide, supporting troops, not the policy, and they're honoring people who died in the Pentagon attack on 9/11." Not the policy?? Um, the Pentagon is the policy. How can you separate the two? With major news organizations displaying such a staggering level of naivete, leave it to Joshua Huck, a junior anthropology major, to write a dead-on editorial Friday in The Daily Texan. He described the whole affair as "a scene that seems to have been taken directly out of Trey Parker's and Matt Stone's political satire "Team America."

In the coming weeks these organizations will spend more energy defending their misguided stance than probably went into the original decision to take part. Rather than take a page from the Miami Herald's DeFede playbook ("Thou shall never admit to a decision made in haste") the Post et al. should simply admit that they were wrong and pull out.

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