Whoever "Ghost of Henry Howell" is, they have totally nailed it with this comment on NLS (bolding added for emphasis):
...The bottom line is that the WaPo has done a pathetic job of covering Virginia issues. The coverage has been half-hearted for years and it's getting worse.From reading the Post, you would think that the District is the job center of the metro area and a bastion of self-rule. It's neither. Yet D.C. Council members are treated by the Post as significant leaders when their actual power is nil. Meanwhile, Virginia state leaders are treated as an after-thought.
This may been an operative dynamic 60 years ago when the Old Dominion was still dominated by the Byrd Machine and D.C. was a mega-City with a population of 750,000. It's not any longer. Virginia is now driving job creation in the mid-Atlantic and our schools are churning out the top minds in the nation. Our state leaders (Webb, Warner) take the lead on national policy. In contrast, the District has been losing jobs, population and influence. Even the Redskins are gone. These are facts, not opinions.
Fortunately, VA bloggers (right and left) have stepped into the breach to report on issues, scandals, personalities. That's what the press does in a free society. When was the last time the Post did a feature on a VA politician or political cause? It doesn't.
The last straw is the Post's decision to use D.C. voting rights as a proxy to decide whether a politician is a "moderate" (i.e. good) or "partisan" (i.e. bad). Please. Find an issue that has meaning to 95% of your reading audience before you begin pinning labels on people.
This is a harsh critique because the Post can and should be a national newspaper which reports on Virginia as the largest and most populous jurisdiction (by far) within its circulation.
Let the bloggers be. Use their leads to develop in-depth stories that only a professional reporter has the resources develop. Stop the pointless feuds...
Amen.
To be fair, there IS a River between the District and Virginia, and historically I remember in the 1930's and '40's no one who was anyone nationally lived in Virginia, there was countryside between Washington and Alexandria, McLean was an empty crossroads, Rosslyn was a bunch of tattoo parlors. Then they built the Pentagon, Parkfairfax, and Fairlington... so, you could say it was traditional for the hometown newspapers (The Star and the Post) when covering local news to concentrate on, for example, the lily-white Northwest and neighboring tony Maryland suburbs as being socially significant, forgetting Anacostia, Alexandria, Arlington, which were regarded as bucolic, awfully Southern and forgettable.
Old traditions die hard, I guess. What troubles me even more than their failure to recognize that the demographics and the economic dynamics have changed mightily is the sea change the Post itself has undergone since Mrs. Graham died. From being a leading hard-nosed, investigative newspaper in the grand tradition it has turned into a limp recorder of Republican talking points, a propaganda arm for the Bush regime, almost but not quite as uselessly lop-sided as, say, the Washington Times or Fox News--- the Post is like a Murdoch wannabe.
Is it something in the air nowadays, the market competition in the news industry that is ruining all our major newspapers? Today I cannot imagine the Post every pulling off an investigation like the Watergate break-in.
Here, here.I couldn't agree more. The reason I read the blogs is because the Washington Post's coverage of Virginia political news is horrible, just awful.
They put rookie reporters on stories who are looking to move on to other positions, people who think they are pundits but have no clue how to analyze policy or political races (Tim Craig and/or Amy Gardner), and they spin the crap out of whatever they cover. And no, their spin is not all liberal. They are in Tom Davis' pocket.
From my point of view, one of the primary culprits is the Metro Section editor whom I've been told frequently clamps down on things and has no clue about blogs and a major mistrust of them.
They also are hardly independent. Witness what happened when Tom Davis complained to Tim Craig about their Post abuser fee coverage - the WaPo went silent completely silent and then covered nothing but illegal immigration.
Compare with with the RTD which isn't exactly my favorite paper, but the coverage and analysis provided by Tyler Whitley and Jeff Schapiro (or look at Bob Gibson, etc.) is vastly more objective and superior to what you get out of the Post's reporters. It's because at the RTD covering Virginia politics is an ultimate assignment - not some Metro Section stepping stone to cover national stories.
It's high time you guys stood up to them. A competition may kick their sorry self into shape.
They invested tons of ink and paper in a race that was never close from day one (Petersen-Devolites) and with the exception of Marc Fisher completely ignore two Senate races which were actually close (Cooch-Oleszek & Barker-O'Brien) and several House of Delegate races (Hugo, Rust, Vanderhye-Hunt, and all 3 Prince William races) which their coverage could have actual better informed people about the candidates and the issues.
Their coverage is a function of their news sources and trying to appease the newsmakers, not the people who read their paper. I damn near cancelled my subscription this year I was so pissed off by the time the election was over.