The respected newspaper outed and shamed a private citizen for past offensive behavior. But did anyone even want this?
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/Shutterstock Last week, when Sue Schafer learned that the Washington Post planned to publish a story about one of the dumbest things she had ever done, she had the same question that many readers would have about the resulting 3,000-word article, “Blackface Incident at Post Cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween Party Resurfaces Amid Protests”: Why is this newsworthy?
This is a mortifying tale about one woman’s cluelessness, but why did it end up in a major national newspaper? The Post’s editorial standards declare that “fairness includes relevance.” The non-recent, non-criminal bad acts of non-public figures are not ordinarily considered news, and before June 17, Schafer was a graphic designer with no public profile and no apparent power or ambitions to obtain it.
And if the supposed journalistic purpose of the article was to interrogate the actions of employees of the Post, it failed in a few ways. “My reaction, like everybody, was, What the hell? Why is this a story?” a feature writer at the Post told New York. “My second reaction was, Why is this a 3,000-word feature?” The feature writer added, “This was not drawn up by the ‘Style’ section.”
On June 14, Gruber sent Sullivan a message that “suggested the person wearing blackface might be a producer at the Post,” Sullivan told New York. Sullivan forwarded the message to a couple of features-department editors, she said, “and pretty much lost track of it after that until it published.” But it didn’t take long for Post reporters to establish that it was not one of their colleagues who had worn blackface — Fisher was on the phone with Schafer by June 15.
A third person interviewed by Fisher recounted a similar exchange. “He told me that from a personal perspective, he didn’t think this story necessarily warranted being out there, and that was his personal opinion,” this person said. “He chalked it up to other senior editors at the Post saying it has to go, and he claimed it was out of his hands even though he wrote it.
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