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[This Just In]

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Objective by day, attack dog by night

BY DAN KENNEDY

Fair or foul? Last year, Michael Grunwald covered the Hillary Rodham Clinton–Rick Lazio Senate campaign in New York for the Washington Post, where he is on staff. Grunwald’s dispatches were by most accounts fair and balanced — exactly what you’d expect from the Post and, for that matter, from Grunwald, a talented young reporter who’s an alumnus of the Boston Globe.

Then, in its March 29 issue, the New Republic published a book review by Grunwald of Michael Tomasky’s Hillary’s Turn: Inside Her Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign (Free Press). Gone is the fair and balanced Grunwald of the campaign trail. The Grunwald on display in TNR is an attack dog who uses Tomasky’s book mainly as a jumping-off point from which to trash Clinton, whose campaign and very persona are described repeatedly as “weird and appalling.”

Grunwald’s 4500-word essay was sharply written and enormously entertaining. It also caught the eye of the Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, who recently wrote an internal email complaining about Grunwald’s “quite hostile” attitude toward Clinton, adding that “the credibility of the previous reporting, and the paper’s guidelines for reporters which don’t permit this kind of commentary in the paper, are put in question in a situation like this.”

Now, it’s easy and fun to mock the Post’s dedication to such old-fashioned verities as objectivity. Many observers, including me, have laughed at executive editor Leonard Downie’s solemn refusal to vote, lest he compromise his journalistic purity. And Getler, a former top-level editor at the Post, came across in a recent New York Times profile as something of an old fart who dislikes features, long-form series, and attitude.

In this case, though, Getler’s got a point. Take, for instance, two attacks on Getler, one by Slate’s Jack Shafer (who deserves credit for unearthing Getler’s email), the other an unsigned “Notebook” item in this week’s TNR. The TNR item grumbles that Getler had no business criticizing Grunwald for expressing “his opinions in a venue suited to such expression,” adding that Getler’s real problem seems to be that Grunwald “had any opinions in the first place.” Well, that sounds fine, but if the Post doesn’t want its political reporters expressing their opinions about the subjects they cover, then Getler has a right to be disturbed when one of its reporters writes a freelance piece that he could never write for the Post.

Shafer inadvertently gives the game away by writing, “The old-school fealty to journalistic ‘objectivity’ helps explain why all too often Page One of the Washington Post reads as if somebody has unfurled a sheet of gauze over it, muffling the sights and sounds of the world. Reading the Post many mornings is enough to convince you that you’ve developed cataracts.”

Shafer’s right, and that’s why I’d much rather read the Times’ political coverage than the Post’s: it’s got all the swagger and attitude and opinion that Len Downie and Michael Getler so loathe.

But guess what? It’s Len Downie’s paper, not Michael Grunwald’s, and Getler is giving voice to Downie’s values. In their world, a political reporter for the Post should not so fully reveal himself that a US senator can know, beyond any doubt, that said reporter hates her guts. Old-fashioned? Yes. Wrong-headed? Maybe. But if Grunwald is so eager to vent his spleen in the pages of the New Republic, maybe he should call Marty Peretz and ask him for a job.

Issue Date: April 19 - 26, 2001






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