Hypocrisy and the Washington Post
Is there any limit to the hypocrisy of the Washington Post’s Editorial Page? What brings this to mind is the Post’s recent editorial attacking the District of Columbia’s Inspector General, Charles Willoughby,whose work the same editorial writers had praised a year earlier.
What changed? How, in just ten months, did Mr. Willoughby go from being a trustworthy source to an inept hack in the eyes of the Post? The answer is painfully obvious: Back then, the Post was defending Michelle Rhee, which it has shown time and again that it will do at all costs and in the face of clearly contradictory evidence.
This is what the Post wrote in April 2013: “Several investigations have been conducted into student testing by the public school system. All – including inquiries by the D.C. inspector general and the U.S. Education Department’s inspector general with the participation of the U.S. attorney - concluded that no widespread cheating occurred.” (emphasis added)
As the Post knew (and as we had reported in detail on Frontline), the Inspector General conducted a slipshod inquiry that doesn’t really deserve to be called an ‘investigation.’ Despite evidence of widespread ‘wrong-to-right’ erasures in over half of DC’s public schools, Mr. Willoughby spent 17 months–more than 500 days– ‘investigating’ one school. In that time he interviewed just 34 people! However, the Post’s editorial writers chose to overlook his inept work–a performance that would
As the Post knew (and as we had reported in detail on Frontline), the Inspector General conducted a slipshod inquiry that doesn’t really deserve to be called an ‘investigation.’ Despite evidence of widespread ‘wrong-to-right’ erasures in over half of DC’s public schools, Mr. Willoughby spent 17 months–more than 500 days– ‘investigating’ one school. In that time he interviewed just 34 people! However, the Post’s editorial writers chose to overlook his inept work–a performance that would