...Given the Post's broader record over the past decade, from the war in
Iraq to the conflict in South Ossetia, and Hiatt's response to this
case, it's worth asking if the editorial page has mishandled other
crucial decisions, especially those relating to Russia, as badly as it
has bungled the Moskalenko story. It's a question that needs
answering...

Editorial Malpractice
Comment
By Mark Ames
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081229/ames

This article appeared in the December 29, 2008 edition of The Nation.

Thierry Marignac contributed to this editorial from Paris.

Over the past few years, the Washington Post's editorial page has pushed
an increasingly hostile line toward Russia, painting complex
developments there in Manichaean terms and accusing the Kremlin--and
usually Vladimir Putin--of responsibility for just about anything that
goes wrong, real or imagined, in that part of the world. During the
recent war between Russia and Georgia, Post editorials placed the blame
squarely on alleged Russian neo-imperialism, going so far as to deny
that the Georgians had inflicted serious destruction on the South
Ossetian capital, despite reports from human rights organizations, the
OSCE and even the Post's own journalists. This hardline, deeply flawed
position by one of the nation's most influential editorial pages has
played a leading role in driving America and Russia to the brink of a
new cold war.

A hyperbolic October 22 lead editorial, "More Poison: Another prominent
adversary of Vladimir Putin is mysteriously exposed to toxins," led me
to ask the Post's editorial page editor and onetime Moscow bureau
co-chief, Fred Hiatt, about his sources for the paper's charges. Hiatt's
painstaking response unintentionally offered a rare glimpse into how,
when it comes to Russia and Putin, the editorial page's incessant
demonization puts more weight on ideology than on journalistic
professionalism--or simple fact-checking.

The editorial essentially accused Prime Minister Putin of poisoning a
human rights lawyer in Strasbourg, France, by ordering the planting of
mercury in her car. The lawyer, Karina Moskalenko, has taken on the
Kremlin in the European Court of Human Rights on numerous occasions, so
when she fell ill and her husband found traces of mercury in their car,
French investigators were brought in to conduct an inquiry into a
possible crime. But without waiting for the investigators' report,
Hiatt's editorial page rushed out its verdict, intoning portentously,
"It's chilling to consider that there would be another poisoning of
another Putin enemy in another Western European city."

Le Figaro, which had broken the story of the suspected poisoning a few
days earlier, reported that French investigators had announced that the
lawyer in all likelihood hadn't been poisoned; the mercury came from a
broken barometer from the car's previous owner. The Post didn't retract
or apologize. The editorial page made no mention of the revelation, and
the news editors banished the update to a tiny blurb buried on page A14.

In his e-mail response to my criticism of the editorial, Hiatt ignored
my question asking why the Post hadn't waited for the investigation
results before publishing its own verdict. Instead, he made a new set of
accusations. "I am aware of newspaper articles in Figaro and the New
York Times that quoted unnamed police sources positing the theory that a
broken thermometer was the source of the mercury found in Moskalenko's
car," he said. "These sources were in Paris, where officials may have a
foreign-policy reason not to spark a dispute with Russia, and not in
Strasbourg, where the investigation was taking place." He also implied
that Moskalenko, who doubted the "broken-thermometer theory," as Hiatt
put it, was more reliable than the investigators. These were incredible
charges leveled at Le Figaro and the French political and judicial
systems. But was Hiatt right?

I decided to check his version of events by calling Cyrille Louis, the
Figaro reporter. Louis had broken both stories: the alleged Moskalenko
poisoning and the investigators' findings debunking those allegations.
Unlike the Post, The Nation doesn't have a Paris bureau. And yet it took
just two phone calls to reach Louis and ask him how he reported the
story. "I am frankly surprised that the Washington Post's editorial page
editor would say something like this without even calling me to see if
what he says was true," Louis told me, stunned and laughing. "It's
simply not true. I used several sources, but the two main sources were a
top police official here in Paris and a top investigator from the
prosecutor's office in Strasbourg." Louis even named the source in
Strasbourg--assistant prosecutor Claude Palpacuer. His sources in Paris
are reliable people he has been working with for years. Louis explained
that the investigators felt they'd probably solved the case after they
tracked down the car's previous owner, a local antiques dealer who had
indeed broken an old barometer (not thermometer) in the car shortly
before selling it.

I then asked Louis what he thought about Hiatt's larger assumption: that
Le Figaro's sources in Paris could not be trusted because the French
might be worried about upsetting Russia. Again, Louis laughed in
disbelief: "This sounds like a kind of conspiracy theory. You would have
to believe that judges and police officials in two cities conspired to
manipulate a Le Figaro journalist in order to plant a story that was not
very big news here in the first place. Why would the authorities go
through all of this effort for such a small story? I find this idea of a
conspiracy completely unlikely." Louis was disappointed at Hiatt's
accusations: "I suppose I might feel honored that the Washington Post
bothers to write about me, but you know, I feel a bit surprised. If he
called me I could have explained how I wrote the story. But he didn't
try. Quite often we're very impressed here by how American journalists
work, the high standards they use to source stories.... So it's
disappointing to learn that [Hiatt] came to his conclusions about the
way I work without even calling me."

Louis gave me the contact information for assistant prosecutor
Palpacuer, who is overseeing the investigation. I tapped an old
writer/translator friend in Paris, Thierry Marignac, to interpret for
me. Palpacuer confirmed everything Louis told me, although the case had
moved a bit further since then: "The amounts of mercury were so tiny
that they were not toxic. We took blood samples from Moskalenko's
family, and the results show that the mercury amounts in their blood
were insignificant. In any case, mercury would have to be inhaled or
injected in order to be lethal," Palpacuer said. "The investigation is
not closed yet and has been given to the criminal division of the
Strasbourg police department. But we know the former owner of the
vehicle broke a barometer in it before selling the car, and those
amounts correspond to the amounts we found."

In response to Hiatt's theory that the investigation was unreliable and
probably influenced by Paris officials who didn't want to upset Russia,
Palpacuer burst out laughing: "This is beyond me, I am sorry. I work
with the evidence I have before me in the investigation. But really--the
Russians? Influencing this case? I don't know what to say, it's
ridiculous. I would just say that we welcome any new evidence if anyone
has it. If there is evidence of Russians influencing this investigation,
I would welcome it."

Evidence. Facts. These were not the sorts of things Hiatt's response to
me were concerned with. However, Hiatt did ask me to send along any new
information about the Moskalenko case. Well, here it is--information
that came with the magic of a couple of phone calls.

This leaves us where we started. Will the Post retract this piece of
poorly sourced, unprofessional editorializing? Will the editorial page
be held accountable by its ombudsman and others at the Post? After all,
the ombudsman managed to attack the paper's alleged "liberal bias"
recently--a highly debatable position. But in this case, we have a clear
example of a failure to get the facts right, and a further failure to
retract those errors.

Given the Post's broader record over the past decade, from the war in
Iraq to the conflict in South Ossetia, and Hiatt's response to this
case, it's worth asking if the editorial page has mishandled other
crucial decisions, especially those relating to Russia, as badly as it
has bungled the Moskalenko story. It's a question that needs answering.



About Mark Ames: Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder
and Rebellion From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond
(Soft Skull) and The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia
(Grove). He is a regular contributor to eXiled Online.