Whipping the Post

The Washington Post put a lid on angry readers by removing a letters blog from its Web site. Now the paper's ombudsman defends her assertion that crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff "directed" money to Democrats.

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Media, Politics, News, Jack Abramoff , Farhad Manjoo

Jan. 21, 2006 | "I was imprecise," Deborah Howell, the Washington Post's ombudsman, says in an interview Friday afternoon. "It was a mistake. I don't consider it a huge mistake, but it was a mistake, and I'll correct it."

Howell is referring to a comment she made in her column on Jan. 15 that the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to corruption charges, gave money to Democrats as well as Republicans. The column spawned a storm of hate mail to Howell. Readers insisted her assertion supports the Republican spin of the scandal -- that Democrats were as deeply in bed with the disgraced lobbyist as Republicans.

On Thursday morning, under an avalance of angry letters, Howell responded on the paper's Web site that what she should have said was Abramoff "directed" money to both parties. Which only incited a new wave of anger. One reader fired back: "As others have stated, there is NO EVIDENCE that Abramoff 'directed' tribes to donate to Democrats. None." Another one said: "Please stop with these weak justifications of your reprinting of GOP spin points."

By Thursday afternoon, the tide of reader hate had grown so strong -- and, according to the Post, so vile -- that Jim Brady, who edits the paper's Web site, decided to shut down the commenting feature on post.blog, a Web page that the Post created as an open forum for readers to express their opinions about the newspaper.

Speaking to Salon from her office at the Post late on Friday, Howell says she intends to set the record straight in a column appearing in Sunday's paper. Her story is that while the Abramoff scandal isn't totally bipartisan, the paper has uncovered documents that show that Abramoff told his Indian tribe clients to donate to Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers.

Howell says she stands by the Washington Post's reporting, which shows that Abramoff sent his clients lists of lawmakers whom they ought to give money to; these lists included the names of Democrats. As she noted on post.blog on Thursday, one such list can be seen on the Post Web site here. It shows a document that Abramoff sent to the Louisiana Coushatta tribe, telling them to write checks to organizations and lawmakers on both sides of the political spectrum.

What Howell doesn't address, though, and what many readers have pointed out, is that while it may be true that Abramoff told his clients to give money to some Democrats, and it may be true that some of these clients did in fact donate to Democrats, this chain of events doesn't show that Abramoff exerted any influence over these Democrats. In fact, other news outlets have reported that after Abramoff signed on to lobby for specific tribes, their contributions to Democrats fell. At the very least, this indicates that while Abramoff's tribes may have given money to Democrats, it was Republican lawmakers he was pressing them to cultivate.

To begin with, it's not clear the Indian tribes donated to Democrats just because Abramoff told them to -- the tribes may have been meaning to donate to key Democrats anyway. For instance, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a Democrat from Rhode Island, who collected $128,000 from Abramoff's tribal clients, maintains that the tribes gave him their money because he's been good to tribes. In 1997, Kennedy co-founded the Congressional Native American Caucus, and he has a personal friendship with Phillip Martin, chief of the Mississippi Choctaw tribe, as his spokesman told the Post in June. In addition, even if Abramoff did "direct" this money to Democrats, as Howell wrote, nobody can say that the Democrats who got money from these tribes knew that the money was being orchestrated by the lobbyist. Several Democrats say they had no idea Abramoff was behind the money -- which is plausible, since Abramoff was well known in D.C. for being a Republican. Why would Democrats have reason to assume that he was sending money their way?

Moreover, as Bloomberg news has reported, the share of Abramoff's tribal clients' money that went to Democrats actually fell after he began working with them. Before Abramoff began representing the Saginaw Chippewas, for example, the tribe gave $158,000 to Republicans and $279,000 to Democrats. But in the Abramoff years, the same tribe gave $500,500 to Republicans and $277,210 to Democrats.

Jamison Foser, a senior advisor to the lefty press watchdog group Media Matters for America, which has been one of Howell's persistent critics, says that he would like Howell to clear the record in a more thorough way. Howell should not only say she was wrong in stating that Abramoff personally gave money to Democrats -- she should also give readers the "fuller picture" behind Abramoff's dealings with both parties. Even if the Post has previously reported that Abramoff directed his clients to send money to Democrats, Howell ought to "address the ways the story has been covered by her newspaper," including pointing out, as Bloomberg did, that his tribes didn't shower money on Democrats after he started working with them.

But asked if she'd show readers this "fuller picture," Howell says it's not her duty to delve into the substance of the debate over whether Abramoff did or did not influence Democrats. That's for reporters at the Post to do, she says. Leonard Downie Jr., the Washington Post's executive editor, agrees with this assessment. Downie stresses he is not Howell's boss. As ombudsman, she works independently of the paper's hierarchy. And he says that if readers look at the Post's "voluminous" stories on the Abramoff matter, they'll see a very thorough, full picture of the lobbyist's dealings with both Democrats and Republicans, and it's not Howell's place to give readers that story.

Referring to groups like Media Matters, Downie says, "You're talking about interest groups that form around media criticism -- they have points of view they are seeking to have media respond to, but she [Howell] will not always call it the way they see them."

Downie adds that he's edited much of the paper's Abramoff coverage, and is consequently quite familiar with the scandal. He believes that Howell's version of the story -- that Abramoff directed his clients to give money to Democrats -- is correct. "Knowing the facts," he says, "I believe her response sets the record quite straight." Downie also says he doesn't understand why people on the left are criticizing the Post, since, in his view, the paper's reporting brought this whole scandal into being. "I'm kind of baffled by people who say that we're protecting Republicans, when it's our reporting that brought this to light. If it wasn't for Sue Schmidt" -- the Post's lead reporter on the Abramoff story -- "nobody would have heard of Abramoff and he wouldn't have pleaded guilty to anything. It's like Watergate. For a year we were the only ones reporting on this. The entire scandal is due to the Washington Post's reporting."

Next page: Howell says it's "simply not true" that she's ignored critics