At the risk of perpetuating what the letter writer rightly skewers the
once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle for, here's a Letter We Wish We'd Written anyway:
After more than three years as a Post subscriber, I think I finally understand the newspaper’s editorial policy: Someone prominent makes a statement, and, no matter how outrageous or false, it becomes a peg for a news article to hang on.
Case in point: Karl Rove suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton might have suffered brain damage in a fall she took in December 2012. Rove said she was in a hospital for 30 days (actually, three) and that when she emerged she wore “glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury” (actually, they were her regular glasses).
Rather than treat this as the nonsense it was, The Post published a serious analysis asking whether Clinton’s age and health will be an issue in the 2016 presidential election [news, May 14]. Mind you, Clinton is not yet a candidate for that election.
Rove must be delighted. Thanks to The Post, people are now discussing her age and health rather than why he continues to get a hearing in a serious newspaper.
I can’t wait for the next two years to be over.
Robert Rothman, Washington
Of course, the Bugle is not alone in
catapulting Rove's nonsense to a national audience. As Mr. Rothman notes, the media has already done Rove's job for him by getting people to talk about another non-issue. It's a given by now that the "mainstream media" will continue to breathlessly report on any lie, smear, or crackpot conspiracy that someone, somewhere pulled out of their heinie -- the more outrageous, the better it seems. (It's a lot more edgy than a report on global climate change; who wants to hear about that again?!) The same editorial "standards" that prompted the Bugle, CNN, etc., etc., to dissect Rove's patently absurd "diagnosis" operate every day in the ratings-obsessed, gutless, "not my job to sort out the facts" (i.e., the "
Chuck Todd maxim") newsrooms across the nation. If you want to assign responsibility for the decline in American political discourse, look no further than that.
