More complaining about the Washington Post; why can't I ever shut up?

I read several interesting articles in today's WaPo. Let's jump into the one about the Pulitzer Prizes. Now you would think that even someone as grouchy as I could not find anything to complain about in a simple listing of who won but don't worry I find a way.

The article is called L.A. Times Wins Pulitzer for Public Service. The part that offends me is this bit:

And the smallest winning paper, Willamette Week of Portland, Ore., captured the investigative reporting prize for disclosing the long-ago affair with a 14-year-old girl involving Neil Goldschmidt, a former Oregon governor, who resigned from a state higher-education board as the story was being published.

Um, no, when a 35 year old mayor is having sex with a 14 year old girl that is called rape, sexual abuse, molestation, destroying someone's life, the list goes on but it is not an affair. The whole sentence seems to be written to downplay exactly what happened. "Long ago" makes it sound unimportant but from what I have read this girl's life is still totally screwed up so to her it's current. "who resigned from a state higher-education board as the story was being published" also sounds like the two were not related but my understanding is he resigned citing health problems hoping the Oregonian would go easy on him and they did. Their initial story used the word affair right in the headline! And they didn't mention at all that the reason Goldschmidt came to them was because Willamette Week was about to break the story.

Ugh. Come on WaPo how can I trust the rest of your article about who won what and why when I think the part about this story is soft peddling? (is that a real expression?)

You can find the story I read last fall here, it's a fascinating look at the story behind the story (in fact that is the title). It's from the American Journalism Review.

Moving on, this article, Big-Game Hunting Brings Big Tax Breaks, is very good. The subject matter is appalling to me. It's about how hunters can donate the mounted bodies of the animals they kill to this ghastly museum and get enough of a tax break to pay for the whole expedition.

In all, there were more than 800 big-game and exotic animals piled into an old railroad car behind the Wyobraska Wildlife Museum, a modest and lightly visited facility here, far from any population center.

(Isn't that the worst name ever? And I thought DelMarVa was bad...)

The public benefits, hunting advocates say, because visitors get to see animals they would otherwise never encounter.

That's right and when they shoot enough of them they'll take care of any chances of us ever encountering any of these animals in the wild.

The article also says:

According to critics in Congress, top officials at natural history museums and animal rights advocates, this form of charitable giving allows wealthy hunters to go on big-game expeditions essentially at taxpayers' expense -- an arrangement so blatant that one animal trophy appraiser advertises his services under the headline: "Hunt for Free." The taxpayer subsidies also encourage hunters to track down and shoot the largest, fittest and rarest of the world's animals, the critics say.

See my point above about not encountering these animals in the wild anymore. God this is depressing. It's an excellent article though and you should read it.