Will Marcus Brauchli Please Grow a Spine?The Washington Post executive editor grovels before the paper's critics in the Mad Bitch controversy.
Posted Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009, at 6:48 PM ET
When Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli canceled the Post's Web video feature "Mouthpiece Theater" on Wednesday, his goal was simple: mollify those who were outraged by the July 31 episode that suggested that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be served a bottle of Mad Bitch beer.
But Brauchli's surrender to the offended telegraphs this message to his reporters and editors: We support edgy journalism completely—until we don't, and at that point we'll ship you to the tailor and have you fitted with gags.
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StumbleUponIn Howard Kurtz's Post story about the capitulation, Brauchli attempts to blame the new-fangled Web for the offending video. "We did not have an effective system for vetting videos and other multimedia content," he said. This dodge might wash if the Post had gone online yesterday. But the paper has been on the Web for 13 years, during which it has published loads of potentially controversial content. This sort of excuse-making sounds more like a government bureaucrat defending his corner office than the editor of Washington Post.
Blaming poor vetting for the "serious lapse" that was the Mad Bitch video also opens Brauchli to the charge that he's talking out of both sides of his mouth. Since becoming the top editor at the Post, he's presided over the reduction of its total number of conventional newsroom vetters—i.e., reducing the size of the copy-editing staff and eliminating levels of editing at the newspaper. (Incidentally, I support that initiative.) In the new print regime, reporters are supposed to take greater responsibility for what they produce and not expect somebody to clean up after them. Does Brauchli really expect us to believe that he'll be pitching new safety nets on the Web side at the same time that he's trimming them at the paper?
When Brauchli tells Kurtz that the bitch joke is "really beneath us and not something we should engage in," either he's betraying how little he knows about what goes into the Post or he's playing stupid. The Post overflows with the objectionable, the offensive, the unacceptable, and the transgressive. It's what newspapers do, people!
If you don't believe me, launch a Nexis session and search for "Washington Post and ombudsman and inappropriate." A series of Post ombudsman columns will cascade by, pointing to Post cartoons, articles, columns, headlines, and photographs characterized by readers as outrageous violations of good taste or societal norms. Yes, despite full vetting by the protectors of propriety, the print Post routinely offends readers to their very core!
Cartoons, one would think, have been around long enough for the establishment of an effective vetting system, yet readers routinely take ugly umbrage at the drawings. Readers complained to Ombudsman Deborah Howell about this dig at the late Jerry Falwell by Berkeley Breathed and this "Mother Goose and Grimm" jab at Jews. When Tom Toles drew a hospital bed attended by a "Dr. Rumsfeld" to make a point about the state of the U.S. military, livid vets and the Pentagon brass gave Howell an earful.
During her turn as the Post's fashion critic, Robin Givhan was hauled before the ombudsman's court for her "lapses" so many times she stored a toothbrush and a change of clothes there. In 2005, readers objected to Givhan's critique of Vice President Dick Cheney's attire at a Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial. Other dignitaries were dressed as if attending a state funeral. Here's what Givhan wrote:
The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower. Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.
"Mean, petty, irrelevant and ignorant," sniffed one reader of the piece to then-Ombudsman Michael Getler. Disrespectful to those of us who lost family in the Holocaust, griped others, who regarded it a "cheap shot" and "inappropriate" and "diminishing the power and solemnity of the occasion." Getler called the subject "fair game." Later, the article was part of the assortment that won Givhan, the queen of mean, a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
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One, Cillizza and Milbank were not engaging in journalism.
And two, they weren't funny.
Their gig was sophomoric, not insightful, and brought nothing to the table.
Givhan is a fashion reporter. It's her job to report on fashion. Cartoonists are cartoonists. It's their job to draw cartoons.
Cillizza and Milbank are, supposedly, journalists, and it's their job to be journalists, not to engage in frat humor. Cillizza himself, in his mea culpa, wrote that Mouthpiece Theater took away from what he was trying to do as a journalist.
It seems as if Shafer was trying to make a valid point, but Mouthpiece Theater is not a good example for the point he was trying to make.
-- tinmanic
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I am as much for freedom of the press as anyone. But defending "Mouthpiece Theatre?"
Milbank and Cilizza made a few adolescent attempts at satire and failed miserably. For all I know their supervisor simply used the worst of their few efforts as a rationalization for saving them and himself more future embarrassment.
Imagine the piece they did as a racist jab at Secretary of State Colin Powell and then see if you would be defending it. You see racism, in our culture, is a high crime. Sexism, unfortunately, is not, but most, in the press, don't get that it should be.
Watch Jon Stewart and see how it is done.
-- canaldoc
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