Every Tuesday through Friday the Reliable Source appears on Page 3 of The Post’s Style section. But can you rely on the Reliable Source? That’s the question some readers were asking last week after a brief correction in the newspaper and a follow-up apology in the column by the force behind the Source, staff writer Lloyd Grove. Because e-mail addresses are formed at The Post with the last name followed by the first initial, the apology was headlined “Grovel@WashPost.com.” This was clever, but fell far short of the real offense.
Everybody makes mistakes, but this was a beaut, a falsehood that went directly to the trust between a newspaper and its readers.
The problem began with the Nov. 9 Reliable Source headlined, “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.” It reported on a Vanity Fair magazine article about young female Capitol Hill staffers in which three congressmen were photographed during “a night of carousing and singing” in Washington. The night was Sept. 13, two nights after the terrorist attacks. The Reliable Source item named the partying congressmen in the picture, “none of whom returned our calls” for comment.
The apology came Nov. 13. “Unfortunately for us,” Grove wrote in the Reliable Source, “we never phoned the congressmen, then we compounded this journalistic crime by suggesting they were avoiding us. In fact . . . they were ready and willing to explain their conduct — and did to other reporters. Never mind how this mess-up occurred; it’s not a pretty story. Bottom line: We’re sorry.”
One of the congressmen later explained that nine colleagues were having dinner and that a group of women dining separately later joined the congressmen when “at the end of the evening we began to sing patriotic songs.”
The Post does “mind how this mess-up occurred” and knows how it occurred. But any more detailed account of the episode and its aftermath apparently will remain internal. Asked for comment, Executive Editor Len Downie says, “The correction earlier this week and the apology speak for themselves; this was a serious mistake and a violation of our rules.”
Grove, who also apologized personally to the congressmen, says “I screwed up badly . . . and I wanted to come clean with readers and let them know that I take such mistakes seriously and place a high value on the column’s accuracy and credibility.”
The Post is one of the nation’s leading and most respected newspapers. To use a term often meant to sort out newspapers, it is a “serious” paper. But it is also quirky and has its own personality — hence, the Reliable Source, a sassy, irreverent, gossipy and sometimes offensive (to some) column of celebrity news and off-beat items. It almost certainly has a big readership.
Hence, too, the Style Invitational, a feature on Page 2 of the Sunday Style section that can be very clever and laugh-out-loud funny, with a hard core of loyal readers. But every once in a while it lapses into vulgarity and just plain bad taste.
Both features can seem inconsistent with a serious newspaper such as The Post, diminishing its status in the eyes of some readers. Both provide steady grist for an ombudsman, and I have occasionally, in internal critiques for the staff, challenged one thing or another in them, either on behalf of angry readers or my own sense of propriety, which is almost always regarded as old-fashioned.
Part of The Post’s appeal is that it is bold and takes risks. But you can be funny on Sunday without being vulgar or crude. And you can be sassy and irreverent during the week as long as you don’t misinform. From what I can tell, the Reliable Source item was not intentionally false but rather a serious failure to exercise the kind of care and checking of facts that readers expect from a serious newspaper, even in its most unserious undertakings. Let’s hope The Post is dealing with it seriously.
