Class, Not Race - Washington Post journalists ignore working class issues

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1995 by Amy Waldman

This year, Post-Newsweek Cable stands to benefit from Republican-sponsored telecommunications legislation that would allow them to raise cable rates, and the Post Co.'s TV stations could benefit from a provision to give away broadcast frequencies for free. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to auction the frequencies because to do so could bring the government $37 billion. Even the conservative Journal editorial page has railed against this "GOP Giveaway," but the Post's editorial page has been conspicuously silent. "There is a dangerous line for the Post to handle--the relationship between the paper as a fine journalistic enterprise and the Post as a large business and part of the business community," says Juan Williams, a Post reporter for 19 years.

Indeed, some Post editorial decisions seem to be playing to a corporate peanut gallery. A front-page story on July 30 was headlined "Federal Rules Carry Weighty Responsibility; In Texas, Diaper Company Bears Burden of Compliance." The jump headline, spread across two-thirds of a page, read "Company Confronts a Mountain of Regulatory Paperwork." But the story said that the company's environmental and worker safety requirements were minimal--contrary to the rhetoric on Capitol Hill. And what the Post called the company's financial regulatory burden resulted largely from their decision to sell $75 million worth of junk bonds, and their violation of patent law. Jay Mathews, who wrote the story, says he was surprised because his conclusions ran counter to conventional conservative wisdom. You never would have guessed that from the headline, or the first seven paragraphs. A story that undermined GOP attacks on environmental and worker protections was instead spun to suggest that regulation is overly burdensome--and it ran the day before congressional debate on regulatory roll-back began.

The Graham family serves the dual role of corporate chieftains and editorial supervisors. And while they could be expected to pay close attention to the bottom line, neither Donald Graham, nor his mother Katharine before him, has ever dictated coverage to the editorial side. But it's natural that employees try to please him, especially when he has known some of those employees, such as Samuelson and Mathews, since their days at the Crimson, where they worked together. Don Graham, who succeeded his mother as publisher in 1979 and CEO in 1991, has had more exposure to people of less privileged backgrounds than most of his Harvard classmates--he went to Vietnam and worked as a police officer in Washington, D.C.--but he is now running a major corporation. That means that he's more likely to lean toward, say, regulatory or taxation policies that favor businesses' bottom line rather than workers' interests. He says the paper's editorial pages reflect his politics, and on economic issues in particular, those pages are increasingly conservative.

The op-ed page's tone--relentlessly centrist, moderate, and homogenous, what George magazine calls "post-partisan"--also reflects the thinking of Meg Greenfield, the editorial page editor. Her columns are largely confined to musings on the incivility of political and social discourse; with rare exception, she does not trumpet the cause of the down-and-out. And with the death of liberal Hobart Rowen last April, economic writing on the op-ed page has been dominated by the voices of two regular columnists, Robert Samuelson and James Glassman.