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On Wednesday, Bill Turque, the Washington Postâs education beat reporter, posted an excellent blog item showing his readers a little bit of the inside game at his paper. It was titled âOne Newspaper, Two Storiesââa title that, by the end of the day, would become more apt than Turque ever could have expected.
Thatâs because editors pulled the post off the site Wednesday night, replacing it hours later with a new, dialed-back version.
And there was plenty to dial back. Originally, Turque had set his sights on his colleagues on the editorial page, who take a very different approach when it comes to writing about the cityâs schools.
The proximate cause of Turqueâs post was a Fast Company interview in which D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee explained that an October round of layoffs did away with âteachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of schools.”
The magazine didnât clarify whether Rhee meant that all of the 266 teachers who were left jobless had such serious infractions on their records, or just a handful. And the disclosure of the possibility of sexual abuse was news. So Turque pressed the districtâs office, again and again, for numbers that could shed some light.
Eventually the paper got the numbersâbut not Turque. Instead, the district passed them on to Jo-Ann Armao, an editorial board member who regularly, and relatively sympathetically, writes on Rheeâs efforts to remake the cityâs troubled school system.
Turque was happy to share why he thought he was frozen out of the information:
Where this gets complicated is that board’s stance, and the chancellor’s obvious rapport with Jo-Ann, also means that DCPS has a guaranteed soft landing spot for uncomfortable or inconvenient disclosures–kind of a print version of the Larry King Show.
Thatâs tasty. Tasty enough that I tweeted the Larry King bit, after being alerted to the Washington City Paperâs claim that Turqueâs item was the âBest Blog Post by the Post About the Post,â a sentiment with which Politico media writer Michael Calderone agreed, as did Michael Birnbaum, Turqueâs fellow education reporter at the Post.
In part, Turqueâs post appealed to me as a rare look at a newsroomâs internecine battles. But it also was a pithy explanation of the games sources play, of the different jobs of the beat reporter and the editorialist, and a reassertion of the oft-doubted wall between the two. It was a refreshing and honest item–the kind of behind-the-scenes story that I know many readers would like to see more of.
But all that audience engagement proved to be a bit too much for Post higher-ups. As Erik Wemple of the Washington City Paper noted last night, Turqueâs post was pulled from the site and given a nice scrubbing before going back up. Gone was the Larry King crack, among other shifts, deletions, and rewrites. Turqueâs strong closing paragraph, where he reassured readers that he didnât give a damn about what went on over on the editorial page, was neutered to the point of near-incomprehensibility.
But there was no indication whatsoever that the blog item had been rewritten. A little weird, considering that the original version had already draw praise from the paperâs most dogged hometown observers at the City Paper, andânot to inflate the importance of a couple of tweetsâfrom Calderone and yours truly.
The Washington Post made it clear to me that theyâd have no comment on the decision not to note the changes.
But, suffice to say, readers of Turqueâs blog who hadnât seen the City Paperâs coverage of the matter would have no idea that his points had been dulled down, or know why. (That certainly held true for the PR staffer who returned my call seeking comment, and initially said that she didnât understand my query, considering that as far as she could see the item hadnât been changed.)
In a way, this reminds me of a similar ham-handed episode from this summer involving a Post decision to pull online content without initially telling its readers: the sudden disappearance of a Dana Milbank/Chris Cillizza online video suggesting Hillary Clinton ought to quaff âMad Bitchâ beer. At the time, CJRâs Greg Marx wrote that:
In the absence of some extraordinary circumstance, simply removing material from your site is the wrong thing to do. If you feel that material youâve published crossed some line of tone or taste, and that it went so far that you cannot in good conscience keep it up on your site, the responsible thing to do is to own up to the mistake publicly, not to make the item in question disappear.
Thatâs a good standard. And, itâs important to note, one that makes the truth of Turqueâs accusations a bit beside the point. If the papers editors think his post crossed the line, they should say whyânot only publicly, but on their own site.
Erik Wempleâs follow-up reporting adds a little nuance to Turqueâs charges, as well as some explanation about the paperâs reasoning behind the decision to pull portions of the post. Thatâs a start.
But readers shouldnât have to go Googling to get it.
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