Don't Cry for The Washington Post, It Helped Destroy Media

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 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. Forget the opinion side. 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.

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.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Previously:
• 01/30/26 Price Controls Won't Work Any Better for Republicans Than It Does Dems
• 01/16/26 The Left's Silence on Iran Is NOT Hypocrisy
• 12/26/25: For JD Vance, Free Speech Only Means His Friends Can't Be Criticized
• 12/12/25: The Left Doesn't Believe in the Constitutional Order
• 12/07/25: War Powers Are Dead
• 11/27/25: MTG Embodies the Inanity of Populism
• 11/14/25: Gaslighting Americans is latest Dem Disaster
• 11/11/25: Trump's Filibuster Nuke Would Hand Dems the Keys To Remake America
• 11/04/25: Let's Talk About the Real Genocide of Christians in Africa
• 10/16/25: Obamacare Is a Massive Failure. The GOP Shouldn't Bail It Out
• 10/10/25: Why Aren't 'Ceasefire Now!' Activists Celebrating Trump's Gaza Peace Deal?
• 09/12/25: Israel's Strike on Qatar Should Have Happened Years Ago
• 09/05/25: An Open Letter to My Esteemed Colleagues at the International Association of Genocide Scholars
• 08/29/25: The President Doesn't Get to Dictate How We Express Ourselves
• 08/22/25: Is Socialism as Popular as the Media Think?
• 08/15/25: Save the Little Sisters of the Poor!
• 08/08/25: RFK Jr.'s War on Vaccines and Public Health Continues
• 08/01/25: Europe's Recognition of 'Palestine' Is a Cynical Joke
• 07/18/25: Legacy Media Still Covering for Biden
• 06/27/25: Trump Learned the Lessons of Iraq
• 05/30/25: We Have No Constitutional or Moral Duty to Subsidize Harvard
• 05/30/25: Welcome to the Intifada, America
• 05/16/25: Scapegoating Biden Isn't Going to Solve the Dems' Problems
• 05/09/25: The Pulitzer Prizes Have Become a Sad Joke
• 05/05/25: How Do You Do, Fellow White People? Tim Walz Says Hello!
• 04/25/25: Ketanji Brown Jackson Makes a Powerful Argument for School Choice
• 04/18/25: If Everyone Is an Expert, No One Is
• 03/31/25: The Left's Imaginary COVID 'Reckoning'
• 03/21/25: Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists -- Lee Harvey Oswald Acted Alone
• 03/03/25: Mitch McConnell: A GOP Hall of Famer?
• 02/21/25: RFK's Dangerous Autism Lie
• 02/14/25: It's Time to End the EV Racket
• 02/07/25: If You Really Support Immigration, Stop Excusing Chaos
• 02/03/25: Trump's Gaza Proposal Makes Complete Sense
• 01/24/25: How Biden's Pardons Normalize Abuse of Power
• 01/17/25: Israel Makes a Deal With the Actual Devil
• 01/13/25: Why Javier Milei Matters
• 12/20/24: The Obama Doctrine Is Dead
• 12/13/24: It's time for a national conversation about left-wing violence
• 12/09/24: It's time for a national conversation about left-wing violence
• 11/08/24: Don't Trash the Constitution to Dunk on the Libs
• 11/08/24: This 'liberation' will NOT be reported
• 11/01/24: HARRIS Is the Bigger Threat to the Constitutional Order
• 09/20/24: Fact checked! Harris Is the Extremist
• 07/13/24: Explain Yourself, Kamala Harris!
• 07/05/24: How Biden's Mental Decline Went From 'Misinformation' to Fact in a Week
• 04/12/24: Biden Is Now Chasing the 'Death to America' Voter
• 03/15/24: Turns Out Biden Lied About Hur, Beau, And Why He Pilfered Classified Docs
• 02/09/24: Why Biden Is Threatening to Veto Aid to Israel
• 02/09/23: Electric Cars Are a Scam
• 06/30/23: Americans Have Never Been Less Threatened by 'Extreme Weather'
• 03/03/23: Questioning Biden's Ukraine Policy Doesn't Make You an 'Isolationist'
• 01/20/23: No ribbons? Don't hide behind religion!
• 01/13/23: On Classified Documents, Joe Biden Is Out of Excuses
• 04/29/22: Biden's Ministry of Truth
• 04/08/22: The Most Radical Abortion Law in the Nation
• 04/01/22: Recuse Yourself, Joe Biden
• 03/25/22: No, School Boards Are Not 'Banning Books'
• 03/11/22: Let Them Drive Teslas
• 01/28/22: It's Not Government's Job to 'Root Out' Misinformation
• 01/14/22: Biden's Big Elections Lie
• 01/07/22: Schumer's Ugly 'Voting Rights' Gamble
• 12/24/21:AOC's Grasp on American Governance Is a 'Farce'
• 12/17/21: Dems Pivot from Build Back Better to Useless Extremism
• 11/19/21: Reckoning' Over Steele Dossier?
• 10/15/21: The Biden White House Will Pay for Playing Inflation Games
• 09/24/21: The most demonstrable political scandal still ignored
• 09/17/21: Sorry, AOC, The Rich Already Pay Their Fair Share
• 09/02/21: Why Isn't Biden to Blame for COVID-19 Deaths?
• 08/06/21: Biden's Unprecedented Attack on the Constitution
• 07/30/21: Jan. 6 Was Deplorable. It Was NOT a Coup
• 06/21/21: The Myth of Republican Obstructionism
• 05/21/21: What Does Putin Have on Biden?
• 04/16/21: Kristen Clarke Is Unfit to Be in Government
• 03/26/21: No to DC Statehood is far from GOP being reflexive
• 03/22/21: Biden Prepares to Strip College Students of Due Process Rights The Hypocrisy of the Filibuster Busters
• 03/12/21: Biden Prepares to Strip College Students of Due Process Rights
• 03/05/21: AOC's Terrible Minimum Wage Argument
• 02/12/21: The Dem Party Is Radicalizing against the Constitution
• 02/05/21: What NOT to Do with Marjorie Taylor Greene
• 01/15/21: Free Speech Is a Value Not Just a Right
• 12/31/20: It Can't Get Any Worse Than 2020. Here's a 2021 Political Wish List
• 10/26/20: Wanted: An Honest Debate about the Death Penalty
• 10/26/20: These are the questions 'Big Guy' Biden must be forced to answer about Hunter's emails
• 09/11/20: The Dems' Dangerous Delegitimization of the Election
• 08/28/20: Biden Is Underperforming Hillary in Battleground States
• 08/14/20: Kamala Harris, Imaginary Centrist
• 07/24/20: Who you calling a fascist?
• 07/17/20: Speech Police have finally gone too far
• 07/03/20: 'But Gorsuch' Is Still Trump's Best Argument
• 06/22/20: Welcome to America's Cultural Revolution
• 06/12/20: The color of my skin is not an indictment of my morality, nor does it strip me of my agency
• 06/05/20: What this son of immigrants knows about bulding bussinesses --- and the dismay of destruction
• 05/28/20: The Folly of Twitter's Fact-Check
• 05/22/20: Dems Warning Trump Will Reject Election Results Should Look in the Mirror
• 05/15/20: Obamagate Is NOT a Conspiracy Theory
• 05/08/20: Really, Joe --- due process is the opposite of justice?