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Oct 16 2009, 1:20 pm by Matthew Cooper

The Washington Post's Nobel Fetish

My colleague, James Fallows, made an excellent point about The Washington Post's op-ed lamenting that the Nobel peace prize didn't go to the martyred Iranian protestor. He noted that the award can't be given posthumously and thus never went to Gandhi and others who have been overlooked--a point that could have been checked rather easily. More Post weirdness today.

A different standard should probably apply to the opinion pieces. Authors should be given more latitude to hang themselves. But today the Post has a piece that says Obama's Nobel prize in unconstitutional because it violates the emoluments clause and constitutes an office from a foreign government.The piece by Ronald Rotunda and J. Peter Pham is here. A rather convincing takedown is here from Adam Blickstein at DemocracyArsenal.org. I won't rehash the arguments but suffice it to say that the knighthoods awarded by the British to Alan Greenspan and Norman Schwarzkopf survived constitutional muster. You do have to wonder why the Post wouldn't check out this piece more thoroughly. I'm not a constitutional scholar or an attorney but it seems pretty clear that Obama's nobel is constitutional just like Henry Kissinger's or Teddy Roosevelt's.

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Comments (8)

Rhoda

Or President Wilson's own noble peace prize. The fact that two other sitting presidents recivied noble peace prizes should have been a clue that it wasn't a constitutional controversy. The Washington Post is going down the drain; it's sad.

Almatt

I disagree - I think this is a sign that the Post is fully embracing the idea of "the new media." They're emulating the popular modern sage Glenn Beck -- they're just throwing the ideas out there, asking the smart questions, letting others decide. Don't get hung up by facts, just pose fair and balanced questions, and then get out of the way -- the Post gets it.

band being (Replying to: Almatt)

"Don't get hung up by facts" - are you kidding?! As much as the Post may want to be part of the new media and escape the dying newspaper industry it is still a newspaper and newspapers are supposed to report news based on facts. Opinion pieces are an integral part of newspapers but unless opinions expressed are supported by facts then they have no business in a newspaper. Propagating false information and posing ridiculous questions not founded in facts (and not even fully thought-out) is potentially dangerous because it can stir people's emotions over something that is blatantly untrue.

You're right that the Post is following the lead of Glenn Beck and Fox News but to not be appalled by this is astonishing. They've been given a platform from which to spread information and ideas on the basis of their reporting factual information, not because they simply ask incendiary questions with no relevance to real debate.

mesquito66

By my reading of the Constitution, all that would be required is a simple Congressional resolution for Our President to accept his comically undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.

Pineview1997

Pointing out that the Post has a crappy OpEd page = Calling Rush Limbaugh a big, fat, idiot. So obviously true, its almost not worth doing. Almost.

JoriNY

WaPo = FauxNews Lite.
The "analysis" published in the Post is a joke. These two guys also criticize the President for accepting an award and gift when he gave his Cairo speech. And they made an even more silly claim that the President donating the Nobel Prize money to charity would result in a half-million dollar tax benefit to the President - without noting that the deduction would offset the income the President would have to declare for receiving the prize money. It's appalling that the Post would publish such a flawed "analysis" that is clearly just another crazy attempt to manufacture controversy for the blog-o-sphere.
And form what I could gather it's working.

ottovbvs

Ms Weymouth and Hiatt are between them wrecking one of the three leading newspapers in the US. The Post has been running on the last prestige fumes of Watergate for years.

James24

As much as the Post may want to be part of the new media and escape the dying newspaper industry it is still a newspaper and newspapers are supposed to report news based on facts. Opinion pieces are an integral part of newspapers but unless opinions expressed are supported by facts then they have no business in a newspaper.
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