The WaPo’s enterprising and ambitious Petula Dvorak, author of the piece discussed below, and Board Member of the Association of Young Journalists, sometimes has a way of misleading her readers. Here’s the lede from a piece she wrote for the WaPo on September 21:

In military communities across the United States, a debate over the Iraq war is being waged by reluctant, neophyte activists. Their microphones chirp and squeak, or don’t pick up their quiet voices at all. Their signs are too small. They forget the banners. “This is my community. I don’t want to offend people here. But my husband is a soldier; he can’t say anything. So it’s my duty as a citizen to speak up,” Kara Hollingsworth, a D.C. native and Army wife at Fort Bragg whose husband served two tours in Iraq, said as she took a seat on a panel of antiwar activists last week.

“Their microphones chirp and squeak, or don’t pick up their quiet voices at all. Their signs are too small:” we are meant to think that Kara Hollingsworth, offered as the first person quoted in the story, is an example of the “reluctant, neophyte activists.” But she is neither reluctant nor a neophyte.

Here is some information on Kara Hollingsworth, from the North Carolina Peace and Justice Coalition. You can read excerpts of her March 2005 anti-war speech at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina here.

A 25-year old student, mother and army wife living at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Her husband, who serves in the 18th Airborne Corp, was originally deployed to Iraq for one year in 2003 and is currently serving his second tour of duty there. She started to speak out during the elections in the fall of 2004 after seeing and reading about politicians in Washington constantly equating the slogan, “support our troops” with their own profit driven interest in continuing the open ended occupation of Iraq. “My husband is a soldier; those people in Washington asking for your support are business men posing as politicians. If you want to support our troops you have to know the difference”

Hollingsworth’s fellow speakers at the March Fort Bragg anti-war rally were also not neophytes to the world of protest, according to the report in the Revolutionary Worker:

Kara told the RW that discussions have been going on at Fort Bragg among military families over this war—just like in the rest of society these days. Some of the families are all for the war in Iraq. Others were more beginning to question “the mission.” And there were some, like Kara, who have come to some firm conclusions that the U.S. should not be in Iraq. She feels the U.S. government has lied to her about the mission in Iraq and she wants her husband to come home. And she has become an active member of Military Families Speak Out!……Speakers at this North Carolina rally included Camilo Mejia, one of the first GI war resisters to publicly refuse to return to Iraq, and also Kevin and Joyce Lucey, whose son killed himself shortly after coming back from Iraq. He was suffering from depression brought on by what he had seen done to the Iraqi people.

So Kara Hollingsworth has been active in giving anti-war speeches for a year or so, often in the company of the hard core anti-war movement, and, just like Patrice Cuddy, is not the reluctant, neophyte activist portrayed by Petula Dvorak and the Washington Post. The Post should be embarrassed that the publication Revolutionary Worker, the weekly newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party (”the largest Maoist Party in the US”), seems to have a better handle on Kara Hollingsworth than does its own staff.

It seems to us that Dvorak is trying to push an angle that across the heartland, “reluctant, neophyte activists” are springing up to oppose the Iraq war. However, the example of Patrice Cuddy is a flat-out falsehood, and that of Kara Hollingsworth can most charitably be considered merely misleading. In our opinion, Dvorak is pusuing her story line with a pretty flagrant disregard for the truth.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 24th, 2005 at 8:19 am and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.