In the wake of David Petraeus’ resignation as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, there has been a wave of media introspection over the years of favorable coverage the former four-star general curried in his service in uniform and at Langley. Amid revelations that Petraeus carried out an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, there has been—and will likely be more—soul-searching over how Petraeus was presented to the world.
On BuzzFeed yesterday, Michael Hastings scorched Petraeus and the many news organizations that put such a glowing spin on his military operations, particularly the 2007 troop surge in Iraq. “Before Dave fell for Paula, we fell for Dave,” Hastings wrote.
Closer to home, though, the news about Petraeus and Broadwell has some looking to The Washington Post for a quote or two. Broadwell’s co-author on All In: The Education of David Petraeus, was Vernon Loeb, the editor of the Post’s local pages. So far, the Post’s own coverage of the fallout over Petraeus has included plenty of information about Broadwell, but has made only one reference to the fact that her co-author is a current Post editor.
The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone took note of this, writing that the while the Post doesn’t appear to be interviewing its own people, its competitors are:
While the Post hasn’t appeared to make any attempt to interview Loeb, who works at the paper’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., a competitor managed to get in touch with him—at least briefly. The Los Angeles Times noted in a story on the resignation that when “reached by phone, Loeb said he had no knowledge of whether the reports about Broadwell were true.”
Loeb became the Post’s local editor in January 2011 after working as a deputy managing editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. In his previous stint with the Post, he caught some flack in his coverage of the story of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, a soldier who was briefly captured by Iraqi forces in 2003 and whose rescue was gussied up by a Pentagon spin machine that cast her as a guns-blazing action hero. (Lynch’s actual rescue was much more sedate.) Loeb was criticized by the Post’s own ombudsman that his coverage was “based on pretty flimsy sourcing.”
UPDATE, 4:50 p.m.: Calderone reports that Loeb will be addressing his relationships with Petraeus and Broadwell in a first-person story that will appear in the Style section of tomorrow’s Post. Earlier today, DCist asked Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton—who used his column yesterday to criticize the Post’s local coverage (and that of smaller, unnamed media organizations)—whether readers deserve to hear from Loeb.
“Yes, he should speak out,” Pexton writes in an email.
