On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
>
> --- Julia Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Occasionally the Post will skew things and create
> > stuff that just isn't
> > there. And if they do it on the wrong story,
> > someone a lot closer to the
> > facts will harbor a deep mistrust of the paper for
> > 10 years or so, and
> > will only reluctantly be persuated that it's
> > actually a good newspaper.
> >
> > At least, that's what happened to me.
> >
> > Julia
>
> Would you care to be more specific? I understand if
> you don't, of course, but I'm not sure if you're
> writing ambiguously here on purpose or not...
I didn't want to go into detail unless asked, but since you asked, I'll go
into detail.
In December 1988, a few young men in college, including my sister's
ex-boyfriend, were trying to make fireworks in someone's garage.
Specifically, the garage of a Brazilian attache, as his son was one of the
young men in question. Something went wrong (the brother of my sister's
ex who was in high school thought maybe some moisture got in at a stage
where that can be Really Bad), and there was an explosion. IIRC, two of
them died instantly, and the other two were dead within a few hours of
their injuries.
One of the Post reporters working on the story hinted that the explosion
might have had something to do with someone plotting against Brazil or
something like that. And the 11-year-old brother of my sister's ex was
the only one in that family willing to talk to reporters, and the way some
of that stuff was reported, it sounded as if the mother and the aunt had
been the ones talking to that particular reporter. My sister brought back
a couple of relevant issues from the Post, and my roommate (whose father
was my sister's ex's chemistry professor at the University of Maryland)
brought some more to me after Christmas break.
It looked to me like really crappy reporting. And maybe you don't put
your stellar reporters on a garage blowing up like that, but I don't
expect the sort of sensationalism or near-subterfuge that I saw in those
articles, knowing what I knew. So after that, I was not willing to trust
the Post on much of anything, until you and some others convinced me that
it was generally a good paper.
Julia
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