There was a quite heated discussion about this on another forum a while back...I was in the court of "WASH" as they always say to do but after researching I learned that I was the one that was WRONG! You should not wash it first, it just spreads the germs around and cooking kills the germs.

No, never, however in the seventies as a child, I always washed chicken parts because mom did. But chicken is so clean now compared to then and I figured since I high heat most poultry, it's gotta kill the bad stuff better than a rinse of tap water.
We probably didn't need to do it back then either except for the gross factor- the poultry was often bloody and sometimes had feathers.

Chicken parts, no - whole chickens, yes, because I like to remove the lungs and they don't come out in one piece.

I wash absolutely everything (except ground meat). I don't want to eat some strangers fingerprints. I use a large white enamel pot and soak the chicken/turkey in salted water for a little bit and then either roast, fry or brine. I rinse and scrape steaks and roasts, too. Mom always did and I see no reason not to continue the tradition. I know Anne Burrell on the Food Network has said she does NOT wash poultry for the reasons stated above but it just seems icky to me not to. My husband teases me about my "hermetically cleaned" food and the number of times I wash my hands and wipe down the sink and counters but I can't help it.

I wear food grade plastic gloves and rinse the cavity. The glove thing comes from being in the food business for a number of years and the fact that I don't like the feel of poultry skin. I do not let it touch the sink. If it is a large turkey it may take two people to handle. When my mom still owned her farm, in addition to the regular kitchen, we installed a commercial kitchen in the basement. We had the large stainless sinks then and handling large turkeys was really easy.

Yep....I do I know don't need to....but I like to rinse off the stuff that has settled in the bottom of the packaging.
Don't wear gloves...and with a whole bird, I plop in right into the sink...
That's what clorox is for....to kill nasty germs.
Linda C

I wash whole birds too, but not parts. That said, I wash the sink and surround really well first. Then I rinse the bird, remove any gook from the interior, season it and toss in any herbs, etc while still in the sink. Then the bird goes in the oven and I rescrub the sink and finish with clorox wipes - every thing in a wide radius!

Alexa

I wash everything and pat it dry with one use paper towels, except ground meat which I rarely buy. And I wash everything down - counter, sink, boards - with bleach and soap and hot water before and after.

I rinse turkeys but not chickens, which, come to think of it, makes absolutely no sense. It might have been that I saw my grandma rinse the turkey after picking off little pieces of feathers, and then did it all the time. It makes a horrible mess and I always have to bleach the counters too. It might be worth rinsing the cavity if you are going to stuff it, though. I remember hearing that, since it takes so long to get hot in there, you can get a lot of bacteria growth in the meantime. I don't think salmonella makes a heat-resistant toxin, but it still might be a little bit of extra insurance.

I rinse, mainly to get rid of any blood or other crud that may be present. I then dry it fairly well with paper towels. (A wet bird steams rather than crisps; with wet skin you don't get all those yummy Maillard reactions.)