The American Spectator

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Weighty Conservatism

By Wlady Pleszczynski on 10.3.05 @ 1:13PM

Lost in the hurricane over Harriet has been this confirmation, courtesy of Howard Kurtz, of extensive liberal media bias within the confines of his paper, the Washington Post:

On Thursday, [Post] Book World Editor Marie Arana, noting that she had been "a Young Republican at 15, a marching SDSer at 20, and roundly disgusted by the blue-team, red-team political dialogue by the time I turned 30," criticized an article on what was called a "stealth evangelism" festival by saying: "The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions....We're not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I've been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats."

Ms. Arana's remarks came in one of the internal e-mails in which Post employees have been commenting on the state of their paper. Her boss, executive editor Len Downie, found her comments make clear the paper has "a diverse staff when it comes to ideological backgrounds." So a single conservative balances out scores of liberals? That's a heady thought. Coming next: How many liberals does it take to change a conservative light bulb?