Washington Post Shows Agenda In Treatment Of Fast And Furious Report

Washington Post
Washington Post

USA –-(Ammoland.com)- Yesterday’s release of the first part of a joint staff report detailing findings in the Congressional investigation of Operation Fast and Furious did not result in headlines by The Washington Post, let alone a buried independent story at this writing. Instead, its editor chose to publish an Associated Press piece parroting an accusation by the Justice Department that the “Republican Fast and Furious report engages in distortion.”

This does not serve to impartially inform a readership interested in knowing all the facts about the government investigation. It would also appear to be a gross violation of basic canons of journalism adopted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, as well as an apparently “false and misleading statement” CEO Donald E. Graham makes to investors of his publicly-traded company that “Our dedication to top-quality journalism is important to the people at the Company…We all share a belief that the free flow of information is essential to a successful democracy.”

For a paper that is arguably the most influential source for news in the nation’s capital, and in many cases a major influence throughout the country and the world, such deliberate indifference to reporting on a major development emerging from Congress, one with such significant implications, can hardly be attributed to anything other than an agenda to restrict a flow of news that does not serve its agenda, and to only promote stories that do.

This is especially illustrated by the vast amount of material The Post has written in the past about Fast and Furious, notable in its one-sidedness favoring the administration. Chronic recurrences have prompted citizen journalist Mike Vanderboegh, who first reported on a CleanUpATF post about walked guns found at the murder scene of a Border Patrol Agent, to chronicle the more egregious examples on his Sipsey Street Irregulars blog, and to refer to the paper as “Pravda on the Potomac.”

The Associated Press has fared just as poorly in Vanderboegh’s estimation, and he provides many examples where the “AP carries White House meme water.” Gun Rights Examiner reported in January that the AP chose not to include Fast and Furious in its “Top 10” stories of 2011. These examples, and others provided time and again in this column, lend credence to a growing body of evidence that much of the so-called “mainstream media” is now so blatantly untrustworthy in its undisguised bias, influential “Authorized Journalists” no longer feel a need to mask acting in the capacity of government spokesmen, or worse, as Walter Duranty-style Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists.

UPDATE: Gun Rights Examiner has been informed that the AP story available on the WaPo site does not appear in the print edition, meaning readers of the physical paper would know nothing about yesterday’s significant development if that were the only source they relied on for information about developments on Capitol Hill. This correspondent is headed to the library to verify this report.


About David Codrea

David Codrea is a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He is a field editor for GUNS Magazine, and a blogger at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. Read more at www.DavidCodrea.com.

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