Allow us to ride our Solomon hobby horse a little more.
Yesterday, not long after The Washington Post announced that it had snagged the AP’s John Solomon — citing, among other things, his courageous exposure of Sen. Harry Reid’s “ethical missteps,” — news came that the Senate ethics committee had cleared Reid for accepting free ringside seats from the Nevada Athletic Commission.
That ethics complaint, of course, had been spurred by one of Solomon’s hit pieces on Reid, and the one, to our judgment, most riddled with inaccuracies and omissions that served to pump up Solomon’s rather lame story.
But who doesn’t get cleared by the congressional ethics committees nowadays?
Most interesting to us was the AP’s story on the decision, which was written by the AP’s Erica Werner — not Solomon.
And, what do you know, Werner’s piece reads much differently from Solomon’s. A key difference (to dive back in again to my exhausting, Solomon-filled days of late May) is Werner’s description of the seats as “credentials,” as opposed to Solomon’s straightforward “tickets” in his original story. That was perhaps the most misleading and crucial detail in the story. Reid did not accept tickets, which are reimbursable and have a face value, but credentials, which it would have been illegal to reimburse and have no face value. Solomon completely elided that central point in his piece. Somehow, Werner gets it right.
Go ahead, give the two pieces a read side by side.
Coming soon, our conversation with Post assistant managing editor for national news, Susan Glasser.