Let's be honest and accurate here. This is all about the lack of honesty and accuracy in the pages of the Washington Post, and what we can do about it. Both critics of this boycott based their arguments on outdated or otherwise inaccurate assumptions. Sadly this is no longer the Washington Post that broke the Watergate story and uncovered the Nixon cover-ups. The Post - fresh from an orgy of Deep Throated self-congratulation - is aiding the cover-ups and even acting as Karl Rove's "enforcer" against the Deep Throats of today! Skeptical? Consider the Post's attacks against Democrats.com, a group of concerned citizens. (See: http://www.democrats.com/boycott-wp)

I respect those who raise legitimate fears and I will address their concerns fully, honestly, and accurately. Just as the Post should approach journalism, but doesn't. We're open to thoughtful advice from allies, but not abuse. We aren't rash or uninformed, and we will not be mischaracterized as pawns of Karl Rove. Such insults and disrespect can't excuse or defend any of the Post's failures. Those who joined the Post calling us names, please knock it off! More of the same won't explain or legitimize the Post's personal attacks.

Some fear this boycott would "marginalize" us. Wrong. The Washington Post is marginalizing us now and has done so for some time. We aid and abet this by silent assent. Keep in mind we choose to support the Post and its advertisers by paying them our money. Our money. They work for us, not the other way around. When they don't provide professional, quality service and otherwise fail to satisfy our expectations, it's our duty to voice and enforce our concerns. No one else will. This boycott does just that.

What's the alternative? Letters to the editor? Emails of complaint to Dana Milbank? Sit back and hope for better times? All tried and all failed. In fact, Mr. Milbank and the Post became worse, not better, in response. It's time to try something else. It's time for a boycott. We participate in our own irrelevancy when we buy into and support the media marginalization of us and our deeply-held values - with our own money no less! If we can't make the pundits at the Post stop marginalizing us, at least we can stop paying them to do it. We must stop supporting businesses that support the Post's disrespect of and attacks on us. That's what a boycott is. You stop paying for things you don't like.

Will this effort "destroy" The Washington Post? Of course not. Anyone with any concept of the financial strength of the Washington Post Media Empire knows we're not going to kill the Post. That's not even realistic. We don't have that kind of clout in our dreams! So let's not get into fantasy land. We may take away some of the $millions their publishers and editors enjoy - and so what? If they don't do their jobs they don't deserve those $millions - our $millions - to underreport the Stolen Election of 2000, the pre-war lies and countless other Bush Administration failures and crimes.

We may depress the value of their stock, but so what? I don't have stock in the Post. Anyone who does might want to sell it now, because nothing anyone does will prevent this boycott, just as nothing we do will eliminate the Post. So why do it? This is a wake up call for the Post, and it's long overdue.

I support this boycott because the Post is guilty of media malpractice - if not sustained right wing bias. The Post should hold Bush and other right wingers to the same scrutiny they placed on moderate (not liberal or progress) candidates and office holders like Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Despite what some may imagine, the Post is not friendly to progressive causes. I'd love to see the Washington Post give a fair hearing to national health care, unions, peace, environmental protection, verifiable voting, and more. It doesn't. I wish the Post would tell the truth about the Bush tax cuts, efforts to privatize Social Security, the illegal outing of Valerie Plame, and other stories which would run on page one day after day if it involved Bill Clinton. Instead, the Post recites RNC talking points. This is nothing new. Here are a few low-lights:

Ceci Connolly repeated RNC talking points about Al Gore "growing up in a hotel suite" in The Washington Post, 6/17/99 to mock Gore's accurate stories of doing chores on his family's farm in Tennessee. Then-Post Ombudswoman E. R. Shipp admitted that Ceci Connolly's "Love Canal" story from 12/2/99 "portrayed Gore as delusional, which fits the role The Post seems to have assigned him in Campaign 2000." That was in a 3/5/00 column which Richard Cohen and Connolly ignored. See Cohen's 8/17/00 column which piled on, attacking Gore's character with inaccuracies and distortions. The clear implication was Al Gore is a big liar, unlikable, delusional and so on. So what if the Post's columnists and beat reporters were lying and Gore was telling the truth? And that's just Al Gore.

The Post printed countless leaks and lies from Ken Starr about Bill Clinton, but most Post readers never learned that Ken Starr helped the Post out of a legal jam. Even this conflict of interest cannot explain the Post's double standards. See the Daily Howler (http://dailyhowler.com/) for general WaPo whoppers. For those about Al Gore see: http://tinyurl.com/78tkk

If non-stop hammering of moderates didn't turn into coddling of the right wing Bush Administration that would be one thing. Aside from their right-of-center positions on key issues and unfair treatment of moderates and liberals, the Post abused its authority and ill-served its readers when it ignored and attacked critics of the Iraq War. This rather than examine the spurious reasons Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld gave for the war. If any of this is friendly to the progressive cause, then I'd say we need better friends.

Instead of reporting the facts, the Post acted as Pentagon propagandists and cheerleaders in favor of Bush and war. My friend David Swanson - a co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition - examined the record. His evidence proves the Post is LYING when they claim there's nothing new or important in the Downing Street Minutes. As Swanson explains, those minutes of meetings assert "that in July 2002 the Bush administration had secretly decided on war and was manipulating evidence related to WMD and terrorism in order to sell it through false advertising."

The Washington Post was silent about these paramount matters then, and they're exacerbating their failure by personally attacking Rep. John Conyers and others who are trying to find out what really happened. Here are a few highlights from David Swanson's exhaustive research:

"Reading all the Washington Post articles, columns, and editorials containing the word 'Iraq' and appearing in the Nexis database in June, July, and August, 2002, fails to find these facts [that Bush lied when he denied he'd already decided on war, that the Bush Administration was manipulating evidence] publicly reported. Of course, I cannot comment on what Post editors knew and kept to themselves, but it is what they told the kids who were going to be sent off to kill and die that seems most significant.

"We find in this period of reporting no report that two false justifications had been settled upon. On the contrary, we read numerous pieces of stenography conveying these false justifications from the mouths of Bush and his top staff to our eyes, as if they were worthy of consideration. We find reports on various people or groups, such as European leaders, having concluded that Bush was set on war, but no report from the Post on whether that was true or not. In fact, we find almost no direct reporting on the war planning and its justifications, but numerous tangential articles that slip assumptions in unreported.

"On the editorial pages we find very few letters to the editor on Iraq, but numerous columns and editorials supporting the war, many of which ask the President to hurry up and make a better case for it. We find no strong anti-war voices, and only a few voices with hesitations or concerns." For more see: http://www.democrats.com/node/5077

The Post failed to do its job leading up the Iraq War. They lied calling Al Gore a liar and knowingly cooperated with Ken Starr's criminal and misleading Grand Jury leaks to claim Bill Clinton was a liar and a criminal. Bygones you say? All old news? How about now? Howard Kurtz wrote a piece crediting vague and unfounded accusations about the Downing Street Minutes, which appeared in the Style Section - not the section, much less the front page. Official minutes of a meeting with top British ministers indicate the White House lied to Congress, the American People and the world and fixed intelligence to their determination to start a pre-emptive war, and the Post puts it next to the gossip columns.

Now consider the Post's jeering attacks on Rep. John Conyers and dozens of other Members of Congress who held or attended hearings about the Downing Street Minutes. Cindy Sheehan lost her son Casey to this war, and she testified at the hearings to help support an investigation into all of this.  She doesn't think this is "playing house" no matter what Dana Milbank thinks. Even Michael Getler - the current Post Ombudsman who admits amazing at the Post's failure to cover this story - defended the dishonest reports in the Post!

It fell to Rep. John Conyers to do the Post's job by investigating the Downing Street Minutes. Rather than report the "who, what, where, why, when and how" of this story, the Post acted like Karl Rove's henchmen when they attacked Rep. Conyers for his efforts! Conyers detailed, as if to a freshman on a school paper, what the Post did wrong. The Nation's John Nichols - a writer from a publication concerned with accurate reporting, not currying favor with Karl Rove - explained this very well in an article called by Conyers vs. The Post:

"The years of the Bush presidency will be remembered as a time when American media, for the most part, practiced stenography to power - and when once-great newspapers became little more than what the reformers of another time referred to as 'the kept press.' The Conyers letter, like the thousands of communications from grassroots activists to media outlets across this country pressing for serious coverage of the 'Downing Street Memo' and the broader debate about the Bush administration's doctoring of intelligence prior to the launch of the Iraq war, is an essential response to our contemporary media crisis. That it had to be written provides evidence of just how serious that crisis has grown." (See: www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=3617 June 19, 2005).

We tried other means. Now it's time to hit them where it counts - in the pocketbook. We don't owe the Post our 35c/ at the newsstand or our subscription money. They owe us honest and fair reporting. If they don't want to deliver what we deserve, then we shouldn't pay for them to deliver their substandard product. We don't owe Post advertisers a cent either. Not when they support a paper that won't tell us the truth and twist the news to suit those we oppose.