The Washington Post ran an item recently about a private school in the greater Washington area that was hiring a director of alumni. Doesn’t sound like much of a story, except for the fact that the institution in question is Georgetown Prep, the school attended by Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh. Readers will likely recall that Democrats on the Judiciary Committee—and left-liberal commentators and talking heads across the country—portrayed the school as a place of wild drunken parties and wanton debauchery. The Post item heavily implied that the new hire’s chief responsibility would be to deal with bad publicity occasioned by the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
The opening line of the piece: “When graduates of your school are getting name-checked on ‘Saturday Night Live’ (oh, hey there P. J., Timmy and Squi!) it might be time to . . . um, reach out to them, maybe?”
There was just one small problem, as there often is in these gotcha pieces. The position, contrary to the Post’s claim, hadn’t just been listed. It had been open since July, when Kavanaugh’s nomination was brand new and when all the media could come up with about the man was that he had once bought a lot of baseball tickets. The school twice emailed the Post reporter Emily Heil and her editors to correct the error. A popular twitter account, @AG_Conservative, posted the original email exchange between the school and the reporter, clearly showing that the reporter had been informed before the story ran that the job had been advertised since July.
Heil says it was “a completely unintentional error—I read right over the date in haste.” Fair enough. But surely it’s the job of a reporter, particularly a reporter employed by one of the nation’s premier news organizations, not to read over crucial dates in haste. We’re inclined to think some reporters at the Post and elsewhere in the mainstream press are especially prone to mistakes of haste because they already know, or think they know, the truth—the truth being, for them, the most unflattering possible interpretation of facts pertaining to selected right-of-center targets.
Heil’s column at the Post, incidentally, is called “Reliable Source.”