A bad week for the Washington Post

If you watched the movie "All the President's Men" and loved it, you most likely have an affinity for the Washington Post. It's one of the mighty newspapers in this country. Recently though, things have been a little troubling. First, Carl Bernstein, played famously by Dustin Hoffman, has taken the last 7 years to write a book about Hillary Clinton. I've heard him recently on various news shows talking about his book, and he sounded somewhat incoherent. On Monday night, he appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show. Here's the opening exchange as Bill asks this about Hillary:

O’REILLY (6/5/07): Did she break the law?

BERNSTEIN: Yes.

O’REILLY: OK. Good, I like this. How did she break the law?

BERNSTEIN: She broke the law if, indeed, she perjured herself.

O’REILLY: Well, you just said she did break the law.

BERNSTEIN: No. The special prosecutor determined that she did not. So he did not file the charge.

O’REILLY: So you think she did. But the special prosecutor, Ken Starr, said no.

BERNSTEIN: That is correct. You know what? Let me be really straightforward. I don’t think she broke the law. I think there was a time that she did not tell the truth.

O’REILLY: Under oath?

BERNSTEIN: You know, I wasn’t in the room.

That's Carl Bernstein, the guy who brought down Nixon. And Carl makes me think of the Post, so it's on them sort of.

In an opinion piece in Sunday's Post, Andrew Ferguson was telling us how factually incorrect Al Gore's new book is. He wrote this first paragraph:

"You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88."

Seems like a gotcha moment. Al Gore didn't source his work, and thus, one could be lead to the conclusion that most of his Assault on Reason lacks, well, reason. This article was published, and got past the editors at the Washington Post. Then people began pointing out that Al Gore's book had hundreds of Endnotes. Well that's an Inconvenient Truth. Worse still for the Post and Mr. Ferguson and the last question he asks on the above quote, there's an Endnote for the very quote listed in the very book he was reviewing. So he could have known where it came from, if he read the book.

The Washington Post quickly found out that the entire article was somewhat embarrassing so they did something to show the correction: If you click on the article, you'll see the posts correction:

Correction to This Article
Andrew Ferguson's June 10 Outlook article, "What Al Wishes Abe Said," said that former vice president Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" does not contain footnotes. The book contains 20 pages of endnotes.

Only, it's about half this size, in red, and it looks like an ad. I bring this up because of the irony of an essay about "The Assault on Reason" that is so clearly unreasoned in it's argument that you almost have to laugh. It's like they are trying to be ironic.