Texas Observer Exposes Washington Post Education Reporting

Washington Post reporter Daniel de Vise covered Montgomery County Public Schools before moving to his current assignment covering higher education.

Washington Post Reporter Allows College Officials to Alter Story on Controversial Test 

Reporter breaks journalistic convention by sharing entire drafts with ‘customers’ in University of Texas press office.

In February, Daniel de Vise, a reporter for the Washington Post, arrived at the University of Texas at Austin campus to work on a story about a controversial standardized test sweeping the nation’s colleges and universities. The test purports to determine how much students have learned in college, part of a movement to bring No Child Left Behind-style accountability testing to higher education. University officials were nervous about what the story would say about the politically sensitive topic. Before he landed in Austin, de Vise emailed UT’s director of communications to reassure him that the article was “NOT meant to be any sort of hit piece, more of a thought-provoker.”
De Vise’s visit was fairly routine journalism. He toured campus, visited with students and interviewed administrators. But when de Vise returned to Washington, D.C., he employed some unusual, perhaps even unethical, techniques.
Before publication, de Vise shared at least two complete drafts of his article with UT’s press officers and allowed them to suggest critical edits, some of which ended up in the published story, according to emails obtained by The Texas Observer through a public information request... 

..."Everything here is negotiable," de Vise wrote to Tara Doolittle, director of media outreach at UT-Austin on March 5. "Help me out by not circulating this material very far and by stressing that it is an unpublished draft. If you or anyone at the university has any concerns about it, I implore you to direct them to me. I'm one of a very few reporters here who send drafts to sources!"

In another email, de Vise wrote that he's "never had a dissatisfied customer in this process. And that includes an article a few months ago about a school with one of the nation's worst graduation rates.”...

...De Vise declined comment and referred questions to his editor Nick Anderson, the education editor for the Post, who said he stands by the story. “The story was completely up to our standards,” Anderson said. “It’s a good, fair story and tough story that I think stands the test of time.” Asked about de Vise sharing drafts with sources, Anderson said that the reporter’s “interaction with sources are made in an effort to be fair, complete and accurate as possible.”
Anderson wouldn’t comment on whether the Post has a policy on reporters sharing story drafts with sources. A call to a Post spokesperson seeking comment about editorial policy wasn’t returned...