AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now!, as we turn now to media coverage. We’re going to look particularly at The Washington Post. We’re joined by Michael Getler, who is ombudsman for The Washington Post, and Steve Rendall, senior analyst at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

Steve, you have been very busy analyzing the coverage.

STEVE RENDALL: Well, Amy, the U.S. mainstream media love dissent. They love to report about it. They love to editorialize in favor of it — when that dissent happens in China or North Korea or Cuba. But there’s a gaping double standard when it comes to reporting on dissent here at home. The attitude of journalists to dissent at home seems to be something like, “We have freedom of dissent here, so, you protesters, just shut up.” And so, for instance, after Sunday’s big demonstrations in Central Park, 25,000 people there, demonstrations in several other places across the country, in Monday’s New York Times, we saw the story buried on page B3. That’s in the Metro section.

AMY GOODMAN: The city section of the Metro section.

STEVE RENDALL: That’s right. And in The Washington Post, it was a Nation in Brief squib. There were demonstrations across the country. In Sunday’s New York Times, the same day as the demonstrations, there was a piece on the front page by Blaine Harden and several others reporting about the mixed feelings that people have about the war across the country. And in that story, they said that in San Francisco, demonstrations had been muted and small, when, in fact, a month before, 10,000 people were in Golden Gate Park. USA Today repeated this same canard, saying that the largest demonstration in San Francisco had been a thousand people at U.N. Plaza, when in fact 10,000 people had demonstrated the week before.

Last week, FAIR put out an action alert, and I would urge all your listeners to sign up to Fair’s Listserv to get our action alerts. They’ll get one or two alerts a week. We put out an action alert showing that The New York Times and The Washington Post devoted more coverage to demonstrations against fox hunting in Britain than they did to the huge demonstrations where the crowd estimates ranged between 150,000 and 400,000 people, those huge demonstrations against the war in Iraq.

So, what does this all — why is this important? It’s important because journalism is supposed to keep us informed as citizens in a democracy. And when they don’t report about this, when they don’t report about the views of many of our fellow citizens, we don’t — we’re not informed. We’re not going in. You know, one of the things about the Vietnam War was that the public, at least at a certain point in it, was not with the war, and that was a big problem. Well, there’s a very large sector of the public now that has very mixed feelings about this war, and a significant portion that are flat-out opposed to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s let Michael Getler get in a word edge-wise here. Michael Getler, Washington Post ombudsman, let’s begin with that story, very glaring example of the British protests of between 200,000 and 400,000 people getting perhaps a squib, if that, in The Washington Post. Your response?

MICHAEL GETLER: Well, the day it happened, it actually didn’t get a squib. It didn’t get anything. It basically didn’t get covered. There were questions about how many people. It was clearly a large demonstration. I think the Post eventually said 200,000. And they were remiss. They should have covered. They should have had something in the paper that day.

Now, the next day, Sunday, they had an excellent story by the London correspondent, which — much broader and deeper than covering a rally. Rallies happen all the time for a lot of different reasons. They had a very good story on the front page. It was the off-lead story by the London correspondent, which went much deeper across Europe, bringing together all of the European concerns about the American policy. And that story had a picture of the rally, and it mentioned the rallies. The story was actually more informative than a rally story, but it was — you know, in my view, they should have had a story on the rally when it happened, because I think people want to know the news when it happens. But the other, the Sunday story, was much more informative, much more helpful, much more prominent, and had a lot of reporting by a very good correspondent. So, that’s the way it played out in the paper.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say rallies happen all the time, it seems to be an overall philosophy here about covering protests. When people don’t feel they’re being heard, they come out in the streets to make statements. Bush says something all the time also, and The Washington Post covers a lot of it. Why doesn’t it cover protests as news?

MICHAEL GETLER: Well, you know, any president can set the agenda. It’s not just Bush. If Clinton says something, the Post covers it also, because he’s the president, because they do have a pretty good bully pulpit to produce news or set a national agenda. That’s normal. In a city like Washington, there are demonstrations every day, probably a couple of them on almost any subject you can think of. That may be slight overstatement, but there’s a lot of demonstrations here.

AMY GOODMAN: A lot of demonstrations of thousands of people?

MICHAEL GETLER: Not of thousands of people, no, no. But there have been plenty demonstrations of thousands of people, and they usually get into the paper. But, you know, they’re not — they don’t get big stories all the time. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they get very good coverage.

AMY GOODMAN: Steve Rendall?

STEVE RENDALL: First, I want to give Michael Getler credit for criticizing The Washington Post on their coverage of those huge demonstrations in Britain. But I want to say that full-fledged reporting, journalism, includes recording the views of policymakers and the views of policy critics. When there’s thousands of people in the street, that’s part of accurate reporting, to include that whole spectrum of debate. Jim Lehrer of the NewsHour on PBS refers to demonstrators — when he was defending himself for not covering protest, he called them “moaners and whiners.”

But I want to say that this coverage just of the demonstration in London fits into a larger pattern. I think it’s a pattern that I think you pointed up last week when Democracy Now! canvassed the offices of dozens of senators and found that sentiment against the war, as measured by calls coming into the senators’ offices, was running 10 to one, sometimes 100 to one, against the war. Why aren’t we reading about that? What we hear is that —

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Michael Getler, let’s put that question to you.

MICHAEL GETLER: Well, you know, I said in my column last week that from my very unscientific and anecdotal perch here, that the calls I was getting, just from average readers, not organized campaigns like FAIR mounts, my mail was running mostly against military action, as well. So I have some doubts about some of the larger polls, at least in this area. I think there is a great deal of concern out there from a lot of people.

And I think — you know, I’m not a — I don’t survey the whole press. I read a number of newspapers each day, but I focus mostly on the Post. I think the Post is doing a better job now than it did early on. I was critical of the paper in the last couple of months about what I thought was slow — their being slow to record the voices of dissent, not just people, but they were high-profile voices. You know, when Dick Armey, the House majority leader, spoke up back in August, the Post didn’t have that. And it didn’t really cover the Foreign Relations Committee, the first round of hearings that they had. They had a graph or two. When Scowcroft wrote his piece in The Wall Street Journal, they didn’t really cover that. And they they came back to all those things. They missed these Senate Foreign — Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, where these generals testified. They didn’t cover Senator Kennedy’s speech. A lot of things —

AMY GOODMAN: All these people opposing.

MICHAEL GETLER: Yeah, a lot of things that, no matter what you feel about the policy, these were informative kind of challenges, and in my opinion, they should have been recorded at the time. Now, the paper —

AMY GOODMAN: So, what’s their response? You work for them.

MICHAEL GETLER: Well, they’ve done a lot of other things that are — you know, the Post tends to look, or any, you know, a lot of papers, they tend to look for their own stories to bring us. And they have. They’ve done a lot. They put — they led the paper with the Al Gore speech, for example. New York Times put it inside, which surprised me. They had — 

AMY GOODMAN: Steve Rendall?

MICHAEL GETLER: They had led the paper with the views of Senator Hagel and Senator Lugar, who are challenging the administration. That was very good. They led — they had front-page story entitled “Why Now?” which pulled together a lot of Democratic views on this subject and other challenging views. So, it’s not — they’re doing well, but this is a — this is a hard time, and people are concerned. They’re worried about war. And I think you have to also stay on the news on a daily basis and report things when they happen, rather than come back to them when they’re — when they’re dominated by another newer event.

STEVE RENDALL: With all due respect, I’d like to submit that the problem at The Washington Post — I don’t want to just single out The Washington Post, but Michael Getler’s here, so let’s talk about that. The problems are institutional. You have, look at — look at the roster of columnists offered by The Washington Post. You have George Will and Charles Krauthammer. These are hawks. These are people who represent large conservative movements in this country. They certainly belong on the op-ed pages. But you have no corresponding people from the left or from truly liberal points of view.

MICHAEL GETLER: I have to interrupt you, because that’s an editorial question. Those people have been on the editorial page for a long time. I’m talking, and I only deal with, the news section. And there’s a quite a good wall here between the editorial pages and the news section.

AMY GOODMAN: Actually, it’s a good —

STEVE RENDALL: Well, I would say the ombudsman —

AMY GOODMAN: It’s a good point, though —

STEVE RENDALL: I would say the ombudsman’s purview should be — should be the entire paper. I mean, if you look, Colman McCarthy, who was a true peace activist, was fired by The Washington Post a few years ago. That should be an issue for the ombudsman at the Post as far as we’re concerned.

Following the September 11th, 2001, terror attacks, I did a study of the op-ed pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times. I looked at three weeks of coverage, at every column or op-ed, whether it was by the in-house writers or guest writers, that addressed how the U.S. should respond to the terror attacks. In The New York Times, the columns ran 12 to zero in favor of military action. There were no voices coming from the great traditions of human rights, international law.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have 10 seconds. I want Michael Getler to respond.

STEVE RENDALL: At The Washington Post, it was 30 to two in favor of war.

MICHAEL GETLER: Yeah, well, my recollection is, right after September 11, there wasn’t much dissent, period, in the aftermath of that. In fact, I wrote about that, that one had to look for it and should record it. But there wasn’t much. And the op-ed page of the Post is a totally different operation from the news section.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it at that for now, but we’d like to invite you back to continue this discussion, because it is a very important one, given the role of the media in a democracy. That does it for the show. Democracy Now! produced by Mike Burke, Angie Karran, Ana Nogueira, Mike Di Filippo, engineer and music maestro, Alex Wolfe. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening to Democracy Now!