The Bias of the Washington Post

What a misguided article and a string of scandals reveal about bias and the decline of media accountability.

Keith Alexander, a veteran Washington Post reporter, recently published a piece in which he sympathetically profiles a “victims’ advocate” at the scandal-ridden federal prosecutor’s office in DC who recently retired. Because this article contains many of the most harmful aspects of crime reporting, and because Alexander is a skilled reporter working for one of the leading mainstream news organizations, it’s worth delving into why this piece was so dangerous and misleading, and the reasons the article was planted and framed this way to Alexander by people with power.

The Context:

As an initial matter, some background.  The person profiled by Alexander is a well-known activist for more ruthless punishment.  She has spent years relentlessly seeking longer and longer terms in federal prison for the almost exclusively Black men that her office has chosen to charge with crimes in D.C.  (Because of this prosecutor office’s choices about which crimes to prosecute and which crimes to ignore, D.C. incarcerates Black people at 19 times the rate of white people.) The sentences she advocates for would be considered illegal and barbaric in most other countries in the world. In terms of empirical evidence on future crime, her advocacy for longer prison sentences—even for children—is akin to climate science denial.  

But Alexander’s article is nonetheless a sensitive portrait of her as a “caring” human being who “cares deeply” and has enormous “compassion.” (I only had the mental fortitude to offer these three quotes from Alexander’s sycophantic profile, but you get the point.)

Alexander allows her to frame her retirement to Washington Post readers as a response to her frustration with a small expansion of DC’s Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act (IRAA). The IRAA made possible release from prison for certain people who were 24 or younger at the time of their offense and who have been in prison for at least 15 years (subject to a hearing with a judge, often a former prosecutor, who makes rigorous determinations about whether there is any reason from over the last couple decades that the person shouldn’t be released). But this longtime prosecution activist was apparently so disheartened by the prospect that young people who had spent over 15 years in brutal federal prisons—far away from their families and rampant with sexual assault and physical violence that federal prosecutors choose to ignore—could return home a few years earlier than they otherwise would have that it led to her retirement. It also led to someone pitching this story to one of the most major news outlets in the world. 

Alexander is a seasoned reporter. He has been at the Washington Post for more than 20 years, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative reporting and data collection project tracking fatal shootings by police. Alexander previously published a hopeful article highlighting a group of people who were released from prison under the IRAA and had formed a group to support each other as they rebuilt their lives. But it is critical that we hold even skilled reporters to account when they publish misleading or dangerous articles that are biased, misleading, and that lack necessary context. 

I started this newsletter because we must radically change the way that the news media thinks about and reports on the punishment bureaucracy. Fifty years into the U.S.’s unprecedented mass incarceration revolution, the people who work in news media, like many of us, have become desensitized to just how absurd some of the policies they are talking about are from any objective perspective, as well as to how divorced they are from scientific reality. So I decided to dissect exactly why the Washington Post’s latest whitewashing of the horror and senselessness of this system is so damaging.

The Washington Post’s Thesis

The underlying thesis of Alexander’s piece, delivered through a sensitive profile of a woman who recently retired as a prosecution “victims’ advocate,” is that the release of people from prison early is (a) “unfair” to victims of crime because it deprives them of “truth in sentencing” and (b) harmful to public safety generally at a time when “homicides continue to mount.” Alexander writes that the advocate retired because, with the expansion of the IRAA, she “realized the system that she trusted to provide justice for victims of violent crime had changed.” The message? We shouldn’t “trust” this system because of its growing lenience. And this lenience is illustrated by the fact that, in a rare number of cases, it is now allowing judges to release some people who were young when they went to prison but who are much older now after decades in prison, and even then only if they prove that they are “no longer a threat to society” in court.

So What Did the Washington Post Hide From Readers?

Using this logic, which undergirds the entire piece, Alexander advances a view of the criminal-legal system that is disrespectful to survivors of violence, anti-science, and plain wrong.

Many people who have survived violence in D.C. believe that this bloated punishment bureaucracy has never delivered meaningful “justice” to them. They have called for investment in their needs instead of longer prison sentences that extract wealth from their community and benefit a small group of prison profiteers. All of this is why survivors and advocates for children¹ have been organizing against longer prison sentences, and why a large number of them helped to develop IRAA, which begins to chart a different policy course for D.C. Alexander himself acknowledges openly that “federal prosecutors in [the D.C.] office were often so focused on securing convictions that they spent little time tending to the victims’ families.” And yet, none of those survivor voices who championed IRAA are included in this piece, and readers are not even presented with the idea that this activist’s right-wing views on punishment are hotly contested. This was an editorial decision to erase these voices.

Nor does the WaPo tell readers that the dramatic expansion of prison sentences since 1970 did not make the broader DC community safer from violence and harm. One of the most robust findings in the entire field of criminology is that long prison sentences serve no deterrent effect. The idea that “truth in sentencing” to forever preserve sentences that research now shows are deeply misguided is necessary to advance community safety has no support in the available evidence. At no point in the article are WaPo readers told that the policies that this activist is championing have no deterrent effect on crime. In fact, they increase crime, another fact that WaPo chose to keep from readers:

Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

7) The evidence shows the opposite: the decades-long scientific consensus is that human caging does not reduce crime. This is the most recent meta-study of 116 studies on the question. Sending people to cages does not reduce crime, it increases it:

journals.uchicago.eduCustodial Sanctions and Reoffending: A Meta-Analytic Review | Crime and Justice: Vol 50, No 1Abstract Beginning in the 1970s, the United States began an experiment in mass imprisonment. Supporters argued that harsh punishments such as imprisonment reduce crime by deterring inmates from reoffending. Skeptics argued that imprisonment may have a criminogenic effect. The skeptics were right. Pr…

Perhaps more insidiously, the flawed logic Alexander advances through his sympathetic portrait fails to account for the costs of D.C.’s brutal sentencing regime, such as the fact that mass imprisonment actually kills all of us. I want this to sink in: every year in prison takes two years off a person’s life, and U.S. sentences are now so long that the U.S. life expectancy of our entire population is 1.8 years lower than it would be if we jailed people as much as other comparable countries.

Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

First, take a moment to let this sink in: We know that caging people kills them. Every time a judge jails someone on cash bail or sentences them to prison, the judge is literally killing the person sooner. @PrisonPolicy

prisonpolicy.orgIncarceration shortens life expectancyEach year in prison takes 2 years off an individual’s life expectancy. With over 2.3 million people locked up, mass incarceration has shortened the overall ...

Don’t you think that these are facts that a newspaper would want to tell its readers when it is allowing a “caring” person to comment extensively in a lengthy article on how bad it is that some sentencing laws are getting slightly less punitive?

Alexander’s piece is thus remarkably one-sided. It profiles the political opinions of a federal prosecutor's office that has ruthlessly enforced drug laws, fought for extreme sentences for children, and committed and then hidden rampant police and prosecutor misconduct for years, etc...²  All with no evidence that these policies help anyone, and with a mountain of empirical evidence that they hurt the most vulnerable communities. The article amplifies the perspective of a white woman activist from that office with extreme political views. This distorts the reality that DC’s criminal-legal system has victimized Black people and poor people at a staggering level,³ and many of those people would love to speak to the WaPo about the harm of this activist’s advocacy.

In this article, Alexander makes no attempt to interview the numerous Black families of incarcerated people and survivors of violence in DC who have been fighting against the U.S. Attorney's office campaign of science denial and racial terror for decades. I publicly asked Alexander why he and his editors made these editorial choices, and he chose not to respond.

It gets much worse:

There are other issues with the article, too. While Alexander’s profile of the victims’ advocate is glowing – all those interviewed rave about what a “caring” person she is – Alexander uses deeply dehumanizing language to describe the individuals on the other side of the IRAA reform. Incarcerated people – put into a cage for decades for things they did when they were children or young adults – are referred to as “inmates” or “convicted killers” throughout the piece. This is not an issue of mere semantics. The Washington Post is aware that psychological research shows that this kind of dehumanizing language biases readers against more humane policies and makes them less likely to support reforms to the criminal-legal system. It’s why Fox News uses these terms so consistently even though other outlets have stopped. It’s cruel, and it’s journalistic malpractice. It’s precisely why so many other outlets have committed to stop doing this. Frankly, it’s appalling that WaPo editors are still not demanding that their reporters use people first language.

The WaPo Misleads Readers About IRAA and Other Laws

In truth, the IRAA is a pretty minor tweak to policies that remain unspeakably brutal and anti-scientific. Think of it as if there were a hypothetical society careening toward global climate catastrophe that only slightly reduces carbon emissions to a level still inconsistent with the scientific evidence. This is a systemic problem with the news media and copaganda:

Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

THREAD. One of the things that haunts me about the media's coverage of public safety is its focus on tiny, relatively insignificant tweaks to the policies of police, prosecutors, and courts instead of the root causes of social harm. A few thoughts:

IRAA offered only a small tweak to a harsh system that regularly imposes sentences longer than any other industrialized nation in the world, including on children.  To take one example, the article highlights the release of a human being who was imprisoned as a 17-year-old child and who spent 22 years in federal prison to show how ostensibly “unfair” the IRAA is. It’s hard to believe, but this is a main example offered in the article to support its thesis. This child (now man) had served a longer sentence than would have been allowed virtually anywhere else in the world for a child, and he has now been in prison far longer than he had been alive before he went to prison. To make matters even more absurd, and the Post doesn't explain this, but this person’s original sentence would have required him to serve 25.5 years in prison. So, do you see what the WaPo is doing? This now middle-aged individual is being used to incite outrage against a minor sentencing reform because he was able to reduce his sentence by just 3.5 years (or about 13% of his total “truthful” sentence).

This is the main example that Alexander and his extremist activist use to pontificate about the lack of “justice” under IRAA. The equation of extreme periods of human caging, unrivaled in the rest of the world, with "justice" is a bizarre moral one, and is nearly baseless on the facts of this case.

But then it gets worse. Alarmingly, the article recounts an example in which this U.S. Attorneys’ Office activist improperly exploited a grieving mother of a murder victim. According to the story, she whispered to the woman: “I can use you” to change the laws. What the prosecutor’s office meant by this was that they could weaponize a grieving mother’s pain to seek more punitive legal changes that go against the available evidence of what keeps people safe. They then did, in fact, “use” the woman to work on “closing a loophole in D.C. law” as WaPo puts it.

Alexander and his editors apparently didn’t fact check this. There was no “loophole” in D.C. law, and the more punitive changes prosecutors were able to get legislatively would not have helped the woman’s daughter. Did anyone tell her that? People in D.C. could already “be rearrested and charged immediately if they violated” a protective order. The story actually makes it seem like the activist duped the grieving mother in the same way she apparently duped the WaPo. This is quite common: many of the great legislative successes for punishment bureaucrats—like Marcy’s law—have used grieving families, under the guise of preventing the harm they suffered, to push policies that go far beyond the facts of their cases and that, almost invariably, would not have even helped those families. The failure of media, especially veteran reporters like Alexander, to understand and accurately report on these fraudulent efforts should be a scandal.

Why Is All of This Bad:

What WaPo does here is one of the most harmful things that mainstream media does in crime stories: it uses a sympathetic individual who readers will naturally have an affinity for to be the face of extreme systemic brutality. These brutal policies have been deployed by wealthy, powerful elites to justify not investing in the very things Black and poor communities need to prevent violence: housing, early childhood education, physical and behavioral healthcare, lead abatement, art/music/theater/sports programs, good jobs, etc. The establishment media’s laundering of this elite repression with sympathetic faces of a “caring” woman is profoundly dark.

With Alexander’s piece, the Post thus follows a pattern in crime reporting that I have written about before. The news media uses a sympathetic human interest narrative as a facade for inhumane policies. But here’s the key: the use of a sympathetic figure helps insulate the reporter from criticism of those policy views. It’s not the WaPo speaking, it’s a “compassionate” woman who loves victims and hates violence. This manipulation of grieving families, weaponizing their pain in service of the most brutal anti-science expansion of imprisonment in modern world history, is one of the most disgusting aspects of a profoundly immoral punishment bureaucracy.

So much is wrong with this piece of journalism, but it is of course not an outlier. Alexander, like other smart and well-intentioned journalists, is a product of the punitive logic of a society that has embarked on a decades long mass human caging experiment of a scale unsurpassed in human history. And he works for a paper that has engaged in some inexplicable copaganda recently, including the WaPo's other most prominent local crime reporter printing false information boosting police and then refusing to engage publicly with criticism or correct the misinformation.⁴ I write this criticism to be instructive, in the hope that Alexander and his readers will come to question the flawed assumptions underlying the criminal-legal system and its profoundly cruel sentencing regimes. 

If you like this, please share the newsletter with friends, family, and colleagues. It’s always free! And if you’re inclined, there is an option to donate to our amazing work at Civil Rights Corps so that we can keep fighting against the injustices of these violent and ineffective bureaucracies.

**This piece again owes a great debt to the brilliance of my research assistant Lily Bou.

1. Alexander himself has previously noted that the IRAA sentencing reforms were based on rigorous scientific evidence showing “that the brains of teenagers are not fully mature” and that young people should not be held fully culpable for their actions, even terrible ones.

2. I know this because I was personally responsible for tracking police and prosecutor ethics and criminal violations when I worked at the D.C. Public Defender Service from 2011 to 2014.

3. In DC, Black people are less than one half of the population but account for 86% of arrests. The DC U.S. Attorney's Office is responsible for the fact that almost everyone who DC incarcerates is Black. An internal memo leaked from DC’s U.S. Attorney’s Office admitted that Black people represent “the overwhelming majority of the victims, witnesses, and defendants of the crimes we prosecute,” a result of the Office’s “policies and practices that disproportionately target poor Black neighborhoods.” 

4. The WaPo Editorial Board was recently caught spreading false information boosting the D.C. police budget, and the paper bizarrely endorsed a laughably unqualified D.C. Council candidate running against a popular progressive incumbent with the stated public reason almost entirely being that he used to be a cop.