How a Washington Post Writer's Attack on Bernie Sanders' Civil Rights Record Completely Backfired
I think most of us know the events so far. Capehart ran with an accusation that was false - that Bernie was not the man in an old photo - it was proven false and yet he continued to claim he thought he was right, even though the photographer told him he was wrong, that it was Bernie.
One of the most astounding parts of the whole thing is that Capehart tweeted AFTER he had run this false claim: "Spent the day doing my job. Reporting. Getting the facts. Thinking before writing. New Bernie photo piece coming soon. Not so cut and dry."
Why didn't he do this BEFORE writing a piece on this? Completely unprofessional.
The article lays it all out at the beginning, so if you missed it you can read up on it at the link.
How a Washington Post Writer's Attack on Bernie Sanders' Civil Rights Record Completely Backfired
One of the lamer hit jobs on Sanders by the establishment so far.
By Adam Johnson / AlterNet
February 13, 2016
...
Even if the person in question weren't Sanders—which it almost certainly is—Capehart's piece is a warmed-over hit piece. What motivated him to dust off a story that originally broke three months ago? Ostensibly it was because some unknown number of “Bernie supporters” kept tweeting the photo at him as evidence of his work in civil rights. But Capehart himself admits Sanders' civil rights work at the University of Chicago around 1962 is “not in question,” so why home in on one random photo that a few random people on Twitter bring up?
The official answer, given Capehart’s finger-wagging tone, is that the truth is important and he’s simply trying to correct the record. In fact, it’s an attempt to undermine the two things Sanders needs more than anything right now: people to trust him and African-American voters to like him. Perhaps Capehart believed using his prime op-ed column inches to resurrect a three-month-old story to shame a few Sanders partisans on Twitter was a good use of his pundit capital, but it’s more likely he just wanted to further muddy the waters on Sanders’ civil rights record in the runup to the largely African-American South Carolina primary.
To wit: Capehart goes out of his way to cast aspersions on the Sanders campaign for using the photo in its promotional materials, including a video celebrating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013, but then goes on to explain, “the photo was still captioned as Bernie Sanders in the University of Chicago’s photo archive” as of November 2015. Generally, people go off the official labeling of professional archivists. What was the Sanders’ camp supposed to do, go through every photo of him at the University of Chicago and double-check the work of professional archivists?
This is a silly standard and one Capehart doesn’t clearly explain. When Capehart asked why the campaign hadn’t re-edited the video to omit the picture, the campaign's response was basically, well, we don’t really know either way. But Jonathan Capehart wasn’t having any of it. His argument (before it was walked back) ended with this preposterous condemnation:
For a candidate who garnered 92 percent of New Hampshire Democratic voters who said the most important trait for a candidate was that he or she be “honest,” the least his campaign could do is remove that photo from its Tumblr feed and stop physically placing him where he existed only in spirit.
Now it seems Capehart's moralizing tone was wildly misplaced, if not disingenuous. The Sanders camp was right to hedge their bets without making a claim either way, as was Time and the University of Chicago after the mistake was brought to their attention. The Washington Post, despite this new information, still seems content on vaguely walking this story back rather than admitting they had it wrong in the first place.
http://www.alternet.org/media/how-washington-post-writers-attack-bernies-civil-rights-record-completely-backfired
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Have you seen his twitter feed? I would have shut up long ago if I were him, he's just embarrassing himself.
Especially since he went from his refusal to admit the truth to gushing over spotting Joan Collins at a restaurant and introducing himself to her. I hope she gave him shit for his attempted Bernie smear. That would be epic. I should check her twitter feed. 
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