Readers threw stones this week at a Feb. 7 Page One article on granite countertops, saying it smacked of paid-for product placement, that it was old news about an old trend, that it was too trivial on a big news day and that generally it just didn’t fit.

The story, by Style writer Monica Hesse, was about why Americans are fixated with these slabs for their kitchens. It was intended for the Style section but landed on A1.

Here are some typical reader comments on the article and its prominent placement.

Pablo Collins from Kensington wrote: “How much was The Post paid for the front-page story on granite? (I didn’t realize that The Post accepted advertising on the front page, is this new?) Okay, I know The Post didn’t get paid, at least not directly, for the story, but how much did it save in reporting costs by picking up a trade association’s fluff piece. This isn’t front-page journalism; this article is such a puff piece it barely belongs in the home section. Shame on The Post. Keep this up and my first paper of choice in the morning will be the New York Times.”

“Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.”

That was the headline on a January 30 blog post on The Fix, the Post’s very popular politics blog, by reporters Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake. The post was based on a Gallup study of the average gap between poll respondents in each party who approve of how a president is doing his job in any given year.

It’s a great headline. It’s brief, punchy, says something that a lot of people in the political world talk about. And I’m sure it drove tons of traffic to The Post’s Web site.

But readers wrote to me saying it was at worst wrong, and at best misleading.

As the readers, and the Gallup study pointed out, George W. Bush had the three most polarized years ever in presidential history by this measurement, his fourth, fifth, and sixth years, when the gap between Republicans and Democrats who approved of the way he handled his job was 76 percent, 72 percent, and 70 percent respectively. Obama’s highest mark so far is 68 percent.

Readers were upset that The Post recently ran a print advertisement from followers of Warren S. Jeffs, the imprisoned polygamist and leader of a sect that broke away from the Mormons. They also didn’t like online ads from the Church of Scientology.

The Jeffs-inspired ad, less than a quarter-page, appeared on page A13 of The Post’s Jan. 22 edition. In its hard-to-decipher language, it proclaimed divine revelations to Jeffs, president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and advertised how to send for Jeffs’s books.

The Jeffs ad appeared the same day as an Associated Press article on page A7 about how the sect leader was still managing to lead his flock from prison.

Readers didn’t like running ads from a group whose leader was convicted of sexual assault against underage girls whom he took as wives.

Darrel Salisbury, of Lorton, Va., wrote this to me: “On page A7, 22 January 2012, there is an article about Warren S. Jeffs, convicted child molester, still ruling the bunch of pedophiles known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, while serving life plus 20 years in prison. On page A13, there is a fund-raising advertisement for that same organization. So, now we know how low The Washington Post will stoop to make a buck?”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and President Obama on the tarmac in Mesa. (Haraz N. Ghanbari - Associated Press) Readers were upset at The Post’s description of the tarmac encounter in Phoenix on Wednesday between Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) and President Obama.

Obama was on a post-State-of-the-Union tour around the country to tout his ideas and stopped off in Phoenix to visit an Intel factory. He was greeted at the airport by Brewer and other Arizona elected officials, as is normal, and there ensued an animated discussion between the two chief executives in which Brewer pointed her finger at the president.

Obama, according to the White House pool report and the Post story by David Nakamura and Rachel Weiner, at some point walked away from Brewer and started shaking hands with the other officials there.

Reporters were not within earshot so they couldn’t hear the exchange. But Brewer, afterward, did radio and TV interviews in which she described Obama as “thin-skinned,” “tense” and “disrespectful” and said that the encounter left her “breathless.”

In my Reader Meter blog post last Friday, Jan. 20, I made a mistake and accused The Post of not running the Martin Luther King Jr. Day closings in print before the holiday and of publishing them only online.

I was wrong. The Post did not publish in print the holiday list of government closings and public transportation schedules on Saturday, Jan. 14 — the day I got the e-mails and phone calls on this subject and the day I checked the paper — but it did publish them in print on Sunday, Jan. 15, and Monday, Jan. 16, the holiday itself.

They appeared, respectively, on page C4 of the Metro section on Sunday and page B3 of Metro on Monday.

I should have checked the weekend papers thoroughly and I didn’t. My apologies to the staff and to my readers.