The Washington Post reported (11/5/09) that some Democrats are "questioning whether they should emphasize job creation over some of the more ambitious items on the president's agenda." A couple paragraphs later, reporters Michael Shear and Paul Kane elaborate:

Moderate and conservative Democrats took a clear signal from Tuesday's voting, warning that the results prove that independent voters are wary of Obama's far-reaching proposals and mounting spending, as well as the growing federal debt.

The implication that "job creation" is somehow at odds with "mounting spending" and "ambitious" or "far-reaching" government proposals is a another example of the neo-Hooverism that corporate reporters seem to instinctively subscribe to. In reality, spending money is one of the basic tools governments have for creating jobs during a recession--and cutting government spending is one of the surest ways to make that recession deeper.

It's worth noting that none of the sources actually quoted in the article makes the case that cutting federal spending would be a good way of creating jobs.

Hearing "the whining retreat of a whipped pup instead of the toothy growl of a watchdog," the Colorado Independent's John Tomasic (5/11/09) quotes Washington Post reporter Paul Kane answering an online question with a new excuse for refusing to "call waterboarding people and slamming them into walls torture"--"because [the Post] fears a lawsuit for libel":

New York, N.Y.: What’s the difference between the "harsh interrogations" I keep reading about in the Post and actual "torture"? If it's the same thing, then why not just call it "torture"? I don't get it. Aren't you guys continuing to catapult Bush-era propaganda when you use such Newspeak euphemisms for what we all (finally) know was clearly torture, based on U.S. and International law?

Paul Kane: You can't call someone a convicted murderer until he/she has actually been convicted. Understand? Get it? The reason we say "alleged" murder and things like that is for our own legal protection. So we can't be sued for libel. Take a look at financial reports on the newspaper business. We're not going to do anything that leads to us losing any more money these days.

Tomasic fantasizes about "journalists standing up for themselves against the Bush administration, albeit belatedly, and asserting their right to speak truth to power," but instead has to read "absurd stories like this one last week from Post reporter Carrie Johnson":

Former Bush administration officials have launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to urge Justice Department leaders to soften an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.... The memos offered support for waterboarding, slamming prisoners against a flexible wall and other techniques that critics have likened to torture.

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Glenn Greenwald on Torture" (4/24/09)

Washington Post reporter Paul Kane proffered what blogger Matthew Yglesias aptly called a "full-throated defense of journalism-as-stenography." Kane had been criticized by Media Matters that he had quoted Sen. Olympia Snowe (R.-Maine) as saying that Barack Obama's use of the filibuster-avoiding budget reconciliation tool would make it "infinitely more difficult to bridge the partisan divide" without noting that Snowe had backed budget reconciliation when it was used by George W. Bush. Asked in a WashingtonPost.com chat to defend himself against this criticism, Kane responded:

I'm sorry, what’s to defend?

Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness. We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us. We are not opinion writers whose job is to play some sorta gotcha game with lawmakers.

It's a little dismaying that we have to explain this to professional journalists, but what we want them to do is to examine official claims and put them in context. It's not clear why society would need the kind of institution that Kane thinks he works for; if we want to find out what Olympia Snowe said, we can sign up for her RSS feed.

See Extra!: "Meet the Stenographers: Press Shirks Duty to Scrutinize Official Claims" (11-12/04), by Steve Rendall.