Slate Magazine hammers The Washington Post

Slate [online] Magazine emails a daily newsletter summarizing the content of the major papers. In today’s issue, embedded in the first paragraph, we have the following sentence: “The Washington Post leads with a CIA think tank's report that because of its relative anarchy, porous borders, and large, unguarded weapons caches, Iraq will be a major new breeding ground for terrorists.”

That’s not so bad, right?

Then down a few paragraphs we have the following entire paragraph:

“The Post's lead provides little evidence to back its claim that Iraq is breeding new terrorists: there are no mentions of any specific training efforts discovered thus far, nor of the organizations, locations, or persons involved. The closest thing we get to a hard news item is the number of pages in the CIA report: 119. One expert quoted in the article's second paragraph observes that there is "the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed [in Iraq] will...disperse to various other countries.” Headline news?”

Next paragraph:

“In another piece lacking journalistic rigor, the Post's off-lead asks a few guys in a Baghdad cafe to give their opinions on the upcoming elections. The article's best moment is a nice description of democracy in Iraq-tion: "Candidates' names are not published, for fear of assassination. Rallies are few, posters are often torn down, and hardly anyone can describe a party's platform, much less its nominees.” But almost everyone the reporter interviews supports the elections--a pattern the reported makes no attempt to explain (it's not mentioned, for instance, whether the men are Sunni or Shiite)--so we're left wondering why a half-dozen men in Baghdad should be representative of 23 million Iraqis.”

Why is all this notable you ask? The material at the links is mildly interesting, but -The Washington Post Company just bought Slate Magazine. Perhaps they’re proving their journalistic independence?