The Virginia governor’s race seems to have disappeared from today’s Washington Post print Metro section, though the paper’s Virginia Notebook blog has an article by Rosalind Helderman entitled “Learning New Steps for Doing the Macaca.” Prominently mentioned are the blogposts I have been writing. It quotes a bunch of Republicans criticizing the Post’s coverage (including Oliver North back in 1994), as if to say this is just standard partisan bellyaching. Helderman defends the Post’s 2006 coverage of George Allen but, at least so far as I can tell, doesn’t do much to defend as newsworthy or fair the stories I have been criticizing. Curious. An admission that the charges are valid?
There was another interesting exchange on the subject in a Post blog yesterday. It answers a question I posed in my latest blogpost on the Post’s campaign. I noted that reporter Amy Gardner wrote, “A majority, including McDonnell, voted against her [Judge Askew’s] reappointment.” I wrote, “We aren’t told how many voted for and against, and we’re not told whether any Democrats voted with McDonnell to remover her. Did Amy Gardner suppress some information here that would make McDonnell look less like an ogre?”
Turns out the answer to my question is yes. In the blog, Gardner reveals that two Democratic state senators from Fairfax County, Janet Howell and Richard Saslaw (the latter is now the Democratic leader in the Senate), voted with McDonnell to deny reappointment to Judge Askew. The blog also notes that the hearing, not chaired by McDonnell (as the front page story suggested in its first paragraph) but by another Republican, was considered “as fair as it could be” by Howell and Saslaw. Amy Gardner either knew that Howell and Saslaw voted with McDonnell when she wrote her article or could have easily found out. She did not share that information with her readers. And she still hasn’t told us what the vote was. 7-6? 11-2? It would be interesting to know.
Some Post readers are on to its game. Check out the comments by willbstar, HumbleGovWorker, hisroc, gasmonkey, csw2005, johnemory and StewartIII. It’s to the Post’s credit that it prints (on the web, anyway) these comments.
By the way, John McCormack of the Examiner’s sister publication the Weekly Standard has unearthed a 1999 statement by Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds opposing “special rights for gays” and which quotes Deeds as saying, “I have never voted to allow gay partners to receive medical insurance—or any other benefit.” This is of course of a more recent vintage than McDonnell’s 1989 Regent University thesis, which was the subject of literally dozens of Post news stories, opinion articles and blogposts. McCormack has also written a blogpost mentioning Deeds’s 2006 vote for an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. McCormack notes that Deeds now says, three years later, that that vote was a mistake (though of course it’s the position today of President Barack Obama). He also notes that Deeds supported a 2007 opinion issued by McDonnell, then Virginia Attorney General, supporting gym benefits for same-sex partners at the University of Virginia.
If you gave me 20 minutes to do some googling and 15 minutes or so for writing, I think I could turn out a “news story” whose top paragraphs would suggest that Deeds is a raging homophobe, with exculpatory material planted far down in the story. I might reference Deeds’s 2009 ad, “Deeds Country,” in which he showcases his family and his roots in rural Virginia (the ad got panned by some conservatives, but I thought it was an attractive and effective introductory ad), as evidence that Deeds is a heterosexualist or something of that ilk. A fairer interpretation, I think, is that both Deeds and McDonnell have changed their opinions on gay rights issues over the years, as indeed have a majority of the American people, and that neither man has any animus against gay people. But that wouldn’t advance the obvious agenda of the Post’s news pages.
