Morale is plummeting in the viper’s nest that passes for the Washington Post newsroom.
Not because readers are deserting the paper in droves. Not because the newspaper lost $77 million last year. The oh-so-ethical journalists of the WaPo couldn’t care less about such trivialities. They’re too busy finding ways to cover up Joe Biden’s corruption or swallowing new Deep State lies about Donald Trump’s “existential threat to democracy.”
They’re just upset that the paper’s owner, Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos, wants to stem the bleeding and has installed new management to carry out his wishes.
The new CEO is an energetic Brit named Will Lewis, with impressive runs on the journalistic leadership board on both sides of the Atlantic. He was previously publisher at the Wall Street Journal, on the board of the Associated Press, editor of London’s Telegraph and an investigative reporter for the Financial Times. Not good enough for WaPo’s paragons of elite journalism.
“We are losing large amounts of money,” Lewis told the newsroom earlier this month.
“Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
When Lewis announced a new editor to replace Sally Buzbee, who had quit in a huff rather than accept a demotion for presiding over a newspaper in steep decline, newsroom snowflakes responded with plaintive DEI complaints. According to Vanity Fair, one reporter asked if “women or people of color” had been considered.
Mastheads will roll
Buzbee’s planned replacement, Robert Winnett, another Brit who was deputy editor at the Telegraph, pulled out of the job on Friday after a series of misleading hit pieces on him and Lewis in the WaPo and the New York Times, trying to tag them with various UK journalism scandals.
But the real beef WaPo inmates have with Lewis and Winnett is that they are white males with a record of objective, aggressive journalism, and they had once worked for Rupert Murdoch (the owner of this newspaper).
The WaPo newsroom was jubilant at the scalp, the Times reported with satisfaction. After all, if the WaPo had to start practicing objective journalism and was rewarded by readers, the jig was up for the Times.
“Rat Boy is out!” one journalist crowed, using a nickname Winnett earned in his early days as a reporter who chased scoops, a journalistic style foreign to the WaPo newsroom, where their “scoops” come gift-wrapped from the likes of Democratic dirty trickster Adam Schiff or corrupt factions of the CIA and FBI, no questions asked.
No doubt the WaPo’s corrupt friends in Congress are spooked by Lewis’ journalistic record. For instance, when he was editor, the Telegraph broke a mammoth story about UK parliamentarians scamming expenses, which led to seven resignations and new anti-corruption standards.
The effrontery of a bunch of lazy, unserious Beltway hacks who think they own the newspaper that pays their wages knows no bounds. At Georgetown cocktail parties and their favorite overpriced watering holes, Café Milano and “Le Dip,” they wax lyrical about “ethics” and plot how to preserve the WaPo from Murdochian taint. They see themselves as saviors of journalism and democracy.
But they have done their level best to undermine both.
Phony Trump bump
Their readership figures benefited from an artificial sugar hit during the Trump era because people still believed their lies. They helped cripple his presidency and stop him winning re-election, but they squandered their credibility along the way. Hence the 50% collapse in audience since 2020.
The newspaper’s dishonest partisanship was on display in its decision to shut down its presidential lie-checker database soon after the election of Biden, the biggest liar in the history of the Oval Office. This was after obsessively cataloguing over 30,000 “false or misleading claims” from Trump.
One story gives you a good insight into how “fact-checking” works at the Washington Post.
Chief fact-checker Glenn Kessler decided to try to debunk a story I reported in these pages in May 2021. It was about the night that Biden met with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates of his son Hunter at a dinner in a private room at Café Milano while he was vice president. Among the guests at the April 16, 2015, dinner was Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive from the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma — which was paying Hunter $1 million a year at the time.
Unlike Kessler’s fact check, our scoop has stood the test of time and was confirmed in congressional testimony by none other than Hunter Biden and his former business partner Devon Archer.
Currently, Kessler’s fact check is adorned with seven parenthetical “updates,” four of which correct egregious errors. The WaPo doesn’t call them corrections, even though that is what they are.
My personal favorite is this: “Update, March 1, 2024: Hunter Biden said his father greeted Pozharskyi: “Vadym was one of the people sitting at the table, and he said hello to them.”
This after the WaPo accepted the Biden campaign lie that Joe never met Pozharskyi and Kessler claimed Pozharskyi did not appear on Hunter’s guest list, which he obviously did.
From the start, the WaPo was all too ready to swallow lies from 51 compromised former intelligence officials (mainly CIA) that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was Russian disinformation. It treated our stories with sneering disregard, running a news analysis at one point dismissing our reporting as “sketchy.”
Hunter’s little helpers
Only after the New York Times belatedly acknowledged the veracity of the laptop (deep in the 24th paragraph of a story buried on an inside page) in March 2022 did the WaPo come clean, admitting that it had been sitting on a fourth-hand copy of Hunter’s hard drive for nine months, and, by the way, the contents were real.
So, honestly, the WaPo newsroom has no right to talk about journalistic ethics.
It did its best to kill the presidency of the democratically elected Trump with its bogus Russia collusion fantasy. Along with the Times, it won Pulitzers for that sketchy reporting, which an honest newspaper would have handed back when the stories were debunked by, among others, the Robert Mueller and John Durham investigations and the DOJ inspector general.
Then it helped subvert the 2020 election by suppressing coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop and trashing our reporting.
The WaPo masthead bears the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which has been misinterpreted as a warning about what happens to a free nation without an honest press that holds the powerful to account.
No, for the insurrectionists in the WaPo newsroom, that motto is a command they abide by. Their mission is to keep their readers in the dark.
Too bad for them that the readers are seeing the light.