Playing the role of journalistic firebug, the Washington Post on Monday published a lengthy story about drivers ignoring rules for parking by handicapped drivers — without mentioning that the Post itself had set off a controversy over the issue a week earlier.
The Post’s Shankar Vedantam wrote a front-page piece Sept. 20 about Martena Clinton, whose 1994 Lexus was towed from a handicapped spot at the Washington Convention Center and subsequently lost by the Secret Service and D.C. police while she attended the Congressional Black Caucus dinner.
In the sixth paragraph, Vedantam casually mentioned that “Clinton has the handicapped tag because her husband suffered a stroke.” But Clinton isn’t handicapped. In the online version, readers reacted with more than 700 indignant comments.
“The misuse of handicapped parking tags has become more and more commonplace, and the Post apparently finds it reasonable, reporting such behavior without a blush,” wrote Kerry Snow in a letter to the editor.
Prompted by the reaction to the Post story, The Washington Examiner looked into the problem last week and found rampant abuse. For example, last Wednesday, police in Howard County stopped motorists who pulled into handicapped spots and found 12 of the 42 drivers using tags that belonged to someone else. The Post, meanwhile, blithely began to solicit responses from readers about the problem.
Vedantam, who wrote the original Post piece, said the point of the story was to draw attention to the fact that authorities had relocated a car with handicapped tags on it. But what about the hundreds of readers interested in the kid-glove treatment of a woman who was abusing a handicapped parking placard?
“I have no disagreement with the assertion that the misuse of handicapped tags is a significant public interest issue; it just happens that this story happened to be about another public interest issue,” he said.
