In December of 2016, the Washington Post reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electricity grid through a Vermont utility company, leaving millions without heat.
This was serious stuff. President Barack Obama, the paper ominously noted, was concerned that Moscow might also “disrupt the counting of votes on Election Day, potentially leading to a wider conflict.”
As it turned out, the piece had some journalistic lapses, namely that it had failed to report that the laptop in question wasn’t connected to the grid, so there was no way Russian malware could have crashed the system. The Post never bothered retracting the piece, instead appending one of its anodyne “editor’s notes” and reporting on the subsequent, completely pointless, investigation it had sparked with a bad story.
Everyone makes mistakes. In the old days, journalists would probably have been more judicious moving forward. The Post, which had only a month earlier walked back a similarly alarmist piece about Vladimir Putin’s weak agitprop, went in a different direction, becoming a clearing house for the Russia-collusion panic that enveloped American politics.
In 2018, the Post won Pulitzer Prizes for National Reporting on the fictional claim that Trump had colluded with Putin to overturn democracy.
This week, The Washington Post laid off a third of its entire staff, 300 people. Judging from the reaction of media elites, you may have thought democracy had actually died.
I generally don’t celebrate when people lose their job. As most of us know firsthand, being laid off can be a brutal experience. Indeed, when an outfit such as the Post cuts back its workforce, good people will typically lose their jobs while the worst offenders stay on.
But the unmitigated arrogance and sense of entitlement exuded by journalists, who seem to believe they have a God-given right to work no matter how much money they lose their employer or how poorly they do the job speaks to the problem more.
Over the past decade, the Post has been one of the leading culprits in the collapse of public trust in journalism. The once-venerable outlet has spent the past ten years participating in virtually every dishonest partisan operation of the Left’s enemies, including giving legitimacy to the Brett Kavanaugh group rape accusations, delegitimizing the Hunter Biden laptop story, spreading the Gaza “genocide” lie, covering up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, sliming the Covington children, and countless others. You could write a book listing the Post pieces that were so biased as to be basically fictional.
The Washington Post has also been one of the worst offenders of the unsound journalistic practice in which reporters hand-pick useful partisan ‘experts’ or ‘scholars’ to act as opinion-writing proxies. One memorable example carried the headline: “Vote to oust McCarthy is a warning sign for democracy, scholars say.” (Italics flagging a major incongruity are mine.)
To understand the activist mission of the Post, note that it fired 13 climate change reporters and one reporter whose only job was covering “race disparity.”
Let’s not forget, either, that contemporary “factchecking” ruse, wherein left-wing opinion columnists playact as arbiters of truth and offer partisan arguments and value judgments under a patina of impartiality, was basically invented by the Post.
The newspaper was one of the few media outlets that could still afford much-needed on-the-ground coverage of the world. A few years ago, however, the paper turned into a propaganda outfit for Arab sheikhs. And this is setting aside the Hamas apologists in the opinion pages, such as Karen Attiah, Shadi Hamid and others. At least six members of the Post’s foreign desk previously wrote for Qatari-state run media outfit Al Jazeera, including the Middle East editor, Jesse Mesner-Hage.
Needless to say, the Post’s coverage of the Middle East in recent years was rife with disinformation, necessitating retractions and editor’s notes when they were caught — usually long after the damage was done.
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Now, I don’t want to make the argument here that the Post lost its audience because it was a leftist propaganda outfit. There are many factors at play. The New York Times, for example, is doing just fine. One reason its audience shrunk is that owner Jeff Bezos announced last year that the editorial page would veer less progressive and champion capitalism, something that’s apparently offensive to many readers who live in one of the world’s wealthiest metro areas.
Expectations of wholly unbiased journalism have always been unrealistic. Everyone sees the news through the prism of their experiences and worldviews. But there should always be an expectation of factual coverage. And The Washington Post often failed that low bar.