WaPo Uses Left-Wing 'Activist' For Straight National Security Reporting

Today the Washington Post published an article from William Arkin, who along with Dana Priest attempts to expose government corruption and waste in the area of intelligence gathering. Regardless of what’s in the piece, serious questions are raised about the credibility of a news piece written by Arkin, who has a lengthy history of activism. According to the Washington Post’s own Howard Kurtz, May 24, 2002:

[Arkin] insists he’s not a journalist.

In fact, he’s an activist who works for the liberal group Human Rights Watch. He also does work for the Air Force. He’s also an academic, an author, a newspaper columnist and a talking head.

From his home in the mountains of Vermont, William Arkin seems to have mastered one of the great juggling acts of the multimedia age — persuading news organizations, advocacy groups and the Pentagon, through sheer smarts and a bulldog personality, to take him on his own terms.

“Sometimes I even write a story and get all of them mad at me at the same time,” says Arkin, 46. “Any institution is uncomfortable with someone they don’t control.”

Kurtz provides even more background:

Arkin came to Washington and toiled for a series of liberal groups — the Center for Defense Information, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace and the Institute for Policy Studies. The Reagan administration made noises about prosecuting him in the early 1980s after he revealed the location of American nuclear weapons around the world.

“People have a right to know,” Arkin says.

Without question an “activist” can still perform journalism, even top notch journalism, but when the supposedly unbiased Washington Post trumpets a two-years-in-the-making exposé by a man their own paper regards as a left-wing activist as a straight news piece, the integrity of the ideas in the series and the paper that chose to publish them in such a clandestine way suffers. If the Washington Post is going to push such blatantly agenda driven reporting, can’t it at least fess up to it?

Here’s even more on Arkin’s long history of activism from Hugh Hewitt.