Dear Washington Post: stop publishing lies about Palmer Report. You’re better than this.
If I had a dollar for every time a competing news outlet on the left or right made false claims about Palmer Report, I’d be a wealthy man. Because Palmer Report is so early to major political stories and has such a consistent track record of being proven correct on those stories (partial list), I end up being a target for those who would rather try to sabotage my reputation than compete with me. I choose to ignore 99% of these hijinks. Unfortunately, the Washington Post is now engaging in these antics – and that can’t be allowed to stand.
The Washington Post is one of the most vital political news outlets in America. The work it’s done in exposing Donald Trump’s scandals has been paramount. I cheered when reporter David Fahrenthold won a well deserved Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for exposing Trump’s charity scams. People trust the word of the Washington Post, and they should. And therein lies the problem with a disturbing new Washington Post article from Aaron Blake. The article’s premise is supposedly that pro-Trump sites are unreliable, but its punchline is inexplicably a dishonest and easily disproven attack on Palmer Report.
In his WaPo article, Blake casually and falsely accuses Palmer Report of “wild and unsubstantiated claims” despite offering no legitimate evidence to support such a damning claim. In fact he ends up unwittingly disproving his own assertion with the one example he offers: he points to Palmer Report’s reporting on Mitch McConnell’s financial ties to Russia. But as these things tend to go, our reporting on McConnell was proven correct earlier this month when the Dallas Morning News (link) ultimately confirmed our earlier reporting about McConnell taking Russian money.
In other words, it’s Aaron Blake who’s using the good name of the Washington Post to make wild and unsubstantiated claims about Palmer Report. Distressingly, this is not the first time in which the Post has dishonestly attacked me. Back in April of this year, Palmer Report wrote that Russia was likely involved in the Syrian gas attack. Three days later the Associated Press (link) published a story confirming the same thing. But shortly after the AP story, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote a bizarre column falsely claiming that Palmer Report’s reporting on the gas attack was “fake news.” Again, this was just after the AP had proven that our gas attack reporting was correct.
Milbank’s article was so stunningly inaccurate and off the rails that MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell used a portion of his show that night to rip Milbank’s article to pieces (link). So one would think that the Washington Post, caring about its reputation, would be quick to make a correction. But in an email exchange, Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus flatly declined my request to clean up the inaccuracies in her newspaper’s article.
Marcus also stood by Milbank’s dishonest assertion that Palmer Report was “fake news” because, in her words, it’s merely “a label that would likely be considered opinion or rhetorical hyperbole anyway, particularly in the context of how it is being used in today’s public debates.” That’s right, she argued that Trump’s frequent and dishonest use of the term “fake news” has made it okay for news outlets to dishonestly hurl that same phrase at each other. Again, this was coming from a Washington Post editor. My jaw was on the floor. I still have the email exchange. So does my attorney.
This is not an instance of just one rogue editor. Here’s how Washington Post editor Natalie Jennings responded to me today when I alerted her to the false and unsubstantiated claims made by Blake: she said it’s merely “a matter of opinion.” That’s right, true and false, accurate and inaccurate, are just opinions in the view of this Washington Post editor. This is just four months after a different Washington Post editor told me that yelling “fake news” at me is just a matter of opinion. You see the pattern here, right? There is clearly no oversight at this newspaper. The editors are only there to invent spurious defenses of the dishonest antics of their worst writers.
Over the years Dana Milbank has consistently run into trouble with the truth. He’s been caught misquoting President Obama in order to make a phony argument about him (link). Milbank was banned from appearing on MSNBC for years due to the dishonest nature of his reporting. The Washington Post knows exactly who and what Milbank is, yet they’ve given him a job and let him run free anyway – because while he’s dishonest, he knows how to stir up controversy and therefore page views. I’m still digging into Aaron Blake’s record, but no one should be shocked if it turns out he has a history like this as well. This is simply whom the WaPo hires for its bottom rung.
And so even as the serious reporters at the Washington Post are doing some of the most important investigative journalism of our era, the newspaper is simultaneously relying on its bottom-feeding writers to publish intentionally controversial and dishonest trash for the sake of cheap and easy page views. These kinds of antics only serve to cast doubt on everything else that the Washington Post is publishing. And yet by their own words, the higher-ups running this newspaper are more than happy to make money from these kinds of antics while refusing to clean it up, even when caught.
It is not okay that the Washington Post is allowing its bottom-rung columnists to sabotage the legitimacy of the important work that its top shelf reporters are doing. We need to know that this newspaper can be trusted, and that can’t fully happen as long as people like Blake and Milbank are allowed to publish easily disproven lies. The nation deserves better. Stunningly, the Washington Post has cravenly and sloppily published damaging lies about me twice this year – and I’m just one relatively unimportant individual. How many other lies has the bottom rung of the WaPo published about other people? How many of its other victims have been afraid to speak up? We have no way of knowing for sure – and that’s the problem.
