300 Boycott 'Washington Post' Delivery This Week

By: Joe Strupp At least 300 subscribers to The Washington Post cancelled their subscriptions for this week to protest the paper's coverage of the Middle East, which they claim is anti-Israeli, E&P has learned.

Ted Lutz, Post vice president/business manager, called the number of cancellations "a blip" and "miniscule" since the Post has 570,000 daily subscribers and a daily circulation of 802,594. "We get hundreds of thousands of people stopping the paper each year," he said. "People go on vacation all the time."

But he said the paper understands the concerns of the protesters. "We take this issue seriously," Lutz said. "The overarching goal here is to work everyday to make coverage fair to everyone."

The cancellations are in response to a Web campaign launched several weeks ago urging a Post home-delivery boycott during the week of June 10 to June 17. The anti-Post effort is being promoted on the Web site, www.BoycottThePost.org, which offers no identity for its creator and accuses the paper of unbalanced reporting.

"The Washington Post continually violates the Journalistic Code of Ethics, as well as their own code ascribed by the American Society of Newspaper Editors," a statement on the Web site proclaims. "Their coverage of the Middle East -- in particular their handling of the Arafat-orchestrated Palestinian Terror Campaign that began in Israel in September 2000 and related events -- has been a very poor example of journalism."

Michael Getler, the Post's ombudsman, highlighted the boycott in a June 9 column that sought to defend the paper's coverage and point out that the newspaper had received complaints of bias from both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups. "My general sense remains that, despite some lapses and shortcomings, a fair-minded reader would be well-informed by Post coverage during the course of this almost two-year-old uprising," the column said.