We still don’t have any sort of apology or retraction from the Washington
Post for promoting “The List” – the highly dangerous blacklist that got
a huge boost from the newspaper’s fawning coverage on November 24. The project
of smearing 200 websites with one broad brush wouldn’t have gotten far without
the avid complicity of high-profile media outlets, starting with the Post.
On Thursday – a week after the Post published its front-page news
article
hyping the blacklist that was put out by a group of unidentified people called
PropOrNot – I sent a petition statement to the newspaper’s executive editor
Martin Baron.
“Smearing is not reporting,” the RootsAction petition
says. “The Washington Post’s recent descent into McCarthyism – promoting
anonymous and shoddy claims that a vast range of some 200 websites are all accomplices
or tools of the Russian government – violates basic journalistic standards
and does real harm to democratic discourse in our country. We urge the Washington
Post to prominently retract the article and apologize for publishing it.”