The Decline and Fall of the Washington Post
by John D. O’Connor
The following is an article originally published on American Greatness. Read it HERE.
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The Washington Post has just admitted its business failure, as its owner, Jeff Bezos, is losing $100 million per year. He has effectively thrown in the journalistic towel, as forty percent of his reporters have been dismissed. Yet this was a paper that, not long ago, was known for its world-dominant investigative prowess.
How could this happen? On the wave of seemingly brilliant Watergate “investigative” journalism, the Washington Post was not only the world’s leading media outlet but also the foremost source of political information. Because of Watergate, the paper had rubbed shoulders with, perhaps even stood taller than, the New York Times.
And while the Times had always been substantially suspect in the eyes of conservatives, there seemed to be no fair criticism of the Post after its Watergate success, even though the right-leaning ecosphere was resentful of the paper’s triumphant tone.
To be sure, as only recently exposed by Postgate, its Watergate fraud has been proven beyond a doubt. But even at that, as with other, lesser criticisms of its Watergate reporting, this exposure has not widely taken hold.
In the wake of the Iraq War, as the fear from 9/11 subsided, the Post jumped on the anti-war bandwagon, adopting the jejune construct that Saddam Hussein was only faking the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, the evidence of Iraqi fingerprints on 9/11 was clearly found, but the Post helped erase them from public view, seemingly to make George W. Bush look bad. An employee of the Iraqi Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, left his job to briefly become a greeter at the local airport, warmly received visiting jihadists traveling to the 9/11 planning session, and accompanied the last visitor to the confab. Obviously, if Shakir was, as seems likely, Saddam’s guy, perhaps Iraq supported and helped plan the hijacking, as suggested as well by other substantial evidence, such as the joint manufacture, along with Osama bin Laden, of VX poison in the Sudan.
But after the Wall Street Journal mistakenly touted that a certain Ahmed Hikmat Shakir was a Saddam agent because he was found on a list of Iraqi military, the Washington Post responded to proof that Shakir was never employed by the embassy, jumping on this fact to further claim that such proved a lack of Iraqi involvement in 9/11, a logical bridge too far. But the public bought the Post’s exoneration of Saddam as a probable supporter of al-Qaeda. Indeed, a close analysis of the 9/11 Commission Report shows strong evidence of Iraqi involvement, all concealed by the Washington Post.
This charade, plus the paper’s false connection of the convicted leaker Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, to a ginned-up pretext for war, sealed the jejune case against Bush’s war, eventually leading to the election of the tepid war opponent Barack Obama.
The public generally bought the Post’s analysis, and it retained, still with some conservative disgruntlement, its world-renowned credibility, having now destroyed Nixon, damaged Bush, and elected Obama. The paper clearly relished its exalted position as a discretionary kingmaker or king-destroyer.
Drinking its own Kool-Aid, the Post launched enthusiastically against 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump. Star reporter Bob Woodward unashamedly noted that he had hired thirty reporters to follow Trump, apparently not realizing that such an admission made him appear more a partisan hack than an honest journalist. The Post clearly had lost its way, without the pretense of objectivity that it had touted over prior decades.
After Trump was elected, the Post, per reporters like David Ignatius, went out of its way to pump up the phony “Russiagate” hoax. To the great and everlasting credit of Woodward, he was the lone media voice calling the infamous Steele Dossier “a garbage document.” However, even then, his colleagues did not share his skepticism.
For eight years, the Post jumped on every impeachment, prosecution, or simple defamation of Trump, while failing to publish opposing evidence. This was not lost on the moderate and independent sector of the populace.
Trump, for instance, was impeached for withholding foreign aid in Ukraine until newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky would agree to investigate Joe Biden for corrupt activities as the U.S. “point man” in Ukraine. Indeed, this unduly blunt entreaty to Zelensky appeared on the surface to be a politicized use of foreign aid.
Notwithstanding Trump’s characteristic crudity, the Post withheld significant information from its readers. For starters, U.S. State Department policy had required that the long-corrupt Ukraine be ineligible for lethal foreign aid before it was certified to be non-corrupt.
In March 2019, Ukraine, under the administration of President Petro Poroshenko, was finally certified as non-corrupt. But Poroshenko soon lost the presidential election to Zelensky, whose main supporter and former employer was oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky, in turn, had been the most notoriously corrupt actor in Ukraine, stealing billions from United States foreign aid. And, yes, Kolomoisky had been represented by one Hunter Biden, whose vice president father often aided his son Hunter, who in turn told his daughter in writing that he, Hunter, was forced to give half his fees to his father.
While Trump’s request to Zelensky was unpolished, yes, and crude, the above facts give needed context to a request for a corruption investigation of Biden. The Post was clearly aware of these facts but never told its readers of any of this relevant evidence that should be considered in determining the critical public issue of the impeachment of a president.
In the era of Trump, the Washington Post no longer appeared to be a beacon in the search for truth. Rather, even as “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was proclaimed by the paper’s masthead, the Post had hired hundreds of journalists whose mission was to keep its readers in darkness as to much of the truth.
We have been lectured by the Post for decades about the need for transparency in our civic life. The Post is now in its death throes because of its tragic flaw, hubris. In short, the Post is dying in a democratic darkness of its own making.
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John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened and Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism.