Journalists take vacations, but daily newspapers should not. They’re supposed to be alert all the time. For my 25 cents worth, The Post’s news judgment was on vacation last week.
On Saturday, the most intense rainstorm in decades deluged the city and suburbs. Thousands of homes were damaged and without power. Fires in underground power cables erupted in a major downtown neighborhood. Some roads were flooded and closed, as were some Metro stations. Yet The Post’s Sunday edition didn’t have a word about it on the front page, or a picture. There were stories about India, Europe, a religious youth group and a guide to features.
The only storm story appeared on the Metro section front, and it had the smallest possible headline because a large, pre-planned feature took up most of the space.
On Tuesday, two big stories — an unusual Supreme Court decision in a high-profile Texas case, and an Israeli tank raid into the West Bank town of Jenin — were both handled by The Post in brief, routine wire service accounts at the bottom of inside pages.
The legal decision involved a rare 3 to 3 vote of the nine-member court in the case of Napoleon Beazley, who, at age 17 in 1994, shot and killed the father of a prominent federal appeals court judge. Three justices recused themselves because they know the judge, who lives in Washington’s Virginia suburbs. The unusual tie vote meant no Supreme Court-ordered stay of execution, which requires a majority. Hours later, a Texas board ruled out clemency, but by a 10 to 6 vote. The six votes were reported as among the highest ever received from the board. Little of this was explained in the wire account The Post used. The case has attracted international attention because a juvenile offender was facing execution. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times both had front-page, staff-written stories.
Eight of the nine major newspapers I looked at Tuesday from all over the country had front-page stories on the Israeli incursion into Jenin; some had it as the lead story. The West Bank city is the suspected base for suicide bombers, and the raid marked the first time Israeli forces had entered the center of a Palestinian-controlled city in 10 months of hostilities, according to the brief wire account buried in The Post.
The Los Angeles Times and The Post own a combined news service, and the fuller accounts by Times reporters of the court decision and the Jenin incursion ran on the joint news wire. They were available by 9 and 10 p.m., respectively — in time for most Post editions — yet The Post did not make use of its partner’s material.
News judgment is a subjective matter, and running with the pack is sometimes a mistake. Yet these three stories, coming when there was not much compelling competing news, seemed to deserve being put in front of Post readers in a way that better reflected their news value. The Post bounced back the next day with more thorough coverage on all three. But this is, after all, a daily newspaper.
The story that got the most mail last week was last Sunday’s front-page account of a suburban drug ring and murder. Looking out at readers were photos of three young, white faces, and the headline read: “In N.Va. Drug Ring, Good Kids Went Bad.” This was a carefully reported story. But the headline put it in a different light for many readers and made The Post look naive. “The only thing that made these teen drug dealers-gunmen ‘good kids,’ as opposed to any other drug dealer-gunmen, was the fact that they were white suburban kids,” said one. “Was there anything in the story beyond their participation in Little League that established them as ‘good kids’? ” another asked. “The dominant tone was shock that kids from a ‘good neighborhood’ could be drug thugs. The shock is about 30 years out of date and represents a seriously distorted picture of the situation in this country,” said another.
