Don’t Cry for The Washington Post, It Helped Destroy Media
This framing isn't accidental.
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. Indeed, in 2018, the paper 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 10 years participating in virtually every dishonest left-wing operation, 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 “fact-checking” ruse, wherein left-wing …
This framing isn't accidental.
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. Indeed, in 2018, the paper 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 10 years participating in virtually every dishonest left-wing operation, 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 “fact-checking” ruse, wherein left-wing …
Don’t Cry for The Washington Post, It Helped Destroy Media
This framing isn't accidental.
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. Indeed, in 2018, the paper 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 10 years participating in virtually every dishonest left-wing operation, 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 “fact-checking” ruse, wherein left-wing …
