Washington+Post

00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Media Bias - News - President - Religion - Warner Todd Huston

WaPo Cartoon Features Cursing God, Ridicules Palin’s Religion

September 21, 2008 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

Well, leave it to Pat Oliphant, political cartoonist of the Washington Post, to make fun of both God and Sarah Palin at the same time, eh? Back on September 9, with his Tuesday comic, Oliphant featured a God that curses and portrays Sarah Palin speaking in gibberish as if she were “speaking in tongues” because she is supposedly a crazy Pentecostal. Oliphant apparently isn’t aware she left the Pentecostal Church six years ago? I’m sorry missed this one back on the 9th, but it is no less outrageous now than it was then.

Take a gander at this disgusting display of anti-religious blather:

Imagine having the gall to put curse words in God’s mouth? Not to mention the bigoted way he attacks Palin’s religion!

My guess, you’ll search in vain to find an Oliphant cartoon making fun of Obama’s religion.

This is why they call him Soiliphant… OK, this is why I call him Soiliphant!

00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Elections - Islam - Media Bias - News - President - Society/Culture - Warner Todd Huston

New Media Discovery: WaPo Misidentifies Three As McCain Donors, Apologizes for Mistake

August 8, 2008 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

Amanda Carpenter has an interesting little blurb over at Townhall.com where she reports on Townhall’s catching the Washington Post misidentifying three donors as McCain contributors when, in reality, these donors did not donate to the McCain campaign at all. It seems some due diligence was dropped at the Washington Post, for sure. Good thing the new media was there to correct the story!

In his story headlined “Bundler Collects from Unlikely Sources,” the Post’s Matthew Mosk thought he had a way to insinuate that McCain was taking campaign donations from some “unlikely” Muslims. Mosk detailed what he thought was the campaign donations from three people, Ibrahim Marabeh, and Nadia and Shawn Abdalla, each with Muslim sounding names, that he claimed donated to the McCain campaign through a campaign “bundler” named Harry Sargeant III — a bundler being a campaign supporter that goes out and gathers many donations from friends and associates for his candidate of choice.

Mosk apparently thought that Harry Sargeant III was suspicious because he owns an oil-trading company and the three others apparently seemed suspicious merely because of the sound of their names. But at her Townhall blog, Carpenter discovered in short order than none of the four donors in the Washington Post story donated to the McCain campaign at all.

Mosk also tried to shoehorn into the story the tale of disgraced Clinton “bundler” Norman Hsu, who was “indicted in part on charges of circumventing legal giving limits by routing contributions though ‘straw donors,'” even though there are no allegations of likewise illegalities with Mr. Sargeant’s campaign donations. As if merely mentioning Hsu was enough to tar Sergeant as “unlikely” regardless of the lack of connection or similarities between the two.

As soon as the Post piece came out Carpenter wondered where the Post got its evidence of the donations.

Continue reading “New Media Discovery: WaPo Misidentifies Three As McCain Donors, Apologizes for Mistake”

00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Elections - Media Bias - News - President - Society/Culture - Warner Todd Huston

WaPo: Shocked By Its Own Pro Obama Bias

August 3, 2008 by 2 Comments

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Washington Post’s Deborah Howell has a howeller in the Aug. 3 edition of the paper revealing how shocked and amazed she was that her own paper had a lopsided tally of Obama photographs compared to how many McCain photos appear in its pages. Of course, the amusing thing isn’t that the Post had far more Obama photos than McCain pics but that, regardless of the raw numbers staring her in the face, Howell still insisted it wasn’t because of bias. Apparently it’s just because Obama has a “great smile.” I guess we can mark that trenchant observation as the best reason to cover political candidates as far as the Washington Post is concerned. It’s a big win for a justification for hard news, surely.

Howell apparently was contacted by a retired USA Today reporter who alerted her to the singular fact that Obama’s photo appeared more often than did McCain’s in the paper’s A section from June 4 to July 14. Howell got curious and replicated that study, but expanded it to the entire paper and found interesting results.

What we found: 122 photos of Obama have been published in the paper during that time to 78 for McCain, counting tiny to big. Most of those photos ran inside the paper; most on the politics page. The Page 1 photos are closer: Obama had nine to McCain’s seven. Five of Obama’s were above the fold; McCain had four. Obama also got more color photos, 72 to 49, and more large photos — mostly those that spanned three or more columns, 30 to 10.

Howell also tried to see the numbers in a wider context.

To look at the phenom factor, du Cille went to the Merlin database to see how many pictures have been run of Obama since he first appeared in Post pages in 2003. That would be 1,109. McCain’s pictures go back to the early days of the database, 1995, with 1,032 published. Obama is still ahead.

So, why this disparity? Howell has some excuses… er, I mean explanations.

Continue reading “WaPo: Shocked By Its Own Pro Obama Bias”