I Mean, Really, WaPo

As part of Dowser’s weekly roundup for tomorrow, I spent the last couple hours reading about green jobs and Solyndra, the solar equipment manufacturer that, with a $528 million government loan.

And I just found this piece in the Washington Post, which took the Solyndra scandal as an opportunity to bash Obama’s green jobs program. The problem is that the program has done exactly what it promised—created or saved jobs. In my book, that’s a success.

But these writers, Carol D. Leonnig and Steven Mufson, framed their article to make it sound like a failure.  Here’s the headline:

Obama green-tech program that backed Solyndra struggles to create jobs

Here’s the first paragraph. Italics mine:

“A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.”

Here’s a stat from the eighth paragraph:

“[The Department of Energy] claims credit for saving 33,000 jobs at Ford Motor Co. — about half of the Detroit automaker’s entire hourly and salaried U.S. workforce.”

And a quote from a Ford spokeswoman in the last paragraph, which confirm the Department of Energy and completely contradicts the lede’s implication.

A Ford spokeswoman said the loans helped “transform what were primarily truck/SUV plants into flexible manufacturing plants capable of building more fuel-efficient vehicles.” That flexibility is key to “helping retain the 33,000 jobs by ensuring our employees can build the fuel-efficient cars people want to drive,” said Meghan Keck, who handles government relations for Ford.

The program promised to create or save jobs. That’s it. That’s what it’s doing.

Leonnig and Mufson also left out the fact that, in the last two months, the United States has added 7,000 megawatts of solar projects to our project pipeline. “That’s the equivalent of seven nuclear reactors, which is seven more than we’ve built in the last three decades,” writes TIMES’ Michael Grunwald.

Oh, and, America’s net solar product exports? $1.8 billion. That’s more than China. And remember: I found these two stats above in a little under two hours.

This is a little bit he-said, she-said and a little bit yellow journalism. Gross.