Donald Graham to Newsweek: I Was Once Like You
When your reporting is responsible for a riot, when hipsters start throwing bricks through your windows, when you're feelin' lowdown and mean, who do you turn to? If you're Newsweek (and I hope you're not), you bring in a man responsible for letting even worse reporting go through with even sloppier vetting: Donald Graham. The Observer reports:
But crisis management at the embattled newsweekly had reached a crucial point. Two days earlier, editor Mark Whitaker had retracted a May 9 item about alleged Koran abuse at Guant namo Bay. Now, top executives had descended on New York. Donald Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Company, came in from Washington; [...] Mr. Graham opened the meeting with a speech seeking to rally the staff, according to one person who was in the room. He recalled his tenure as publisher of The Washington Post in 1981, when Janet Cooke s Pulitzer Prize winning story of a child drug addict was exposed as a fraud.
His frank talk encouraged the scribes in attendance, who quickly voted to ditch the apologetic "What's the Matter With the Media" cover in favor of one about how there certainly seem to be a lot of brown-skinned people these days. And really, thank god. The only thing I can imagine caring about less than normal Newsweek reporting is Newsweek reporting on Newsweek.
Newsweek, said former assistant managing editor Sarah Crichton, "is not a blame-filled organization . I ve worked at places where, when something happens, people s heads have to roll. At Newsweek, that s not how it happens."
With a strict no-responsibility policy like that, one wonders what the White House has against them. -AP
