Buzbee announced Sunday night that she’d be stepping down as executive editor.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the failures in journalistic integrity that occurred at the Washington Post under Sally Buzbee’s watch and cover more media misses.
The Washington Post under Sally Buzbee
The Washington Post announced on Sunday that executive editor Sally Buzbee would be leaving her position, effective immediately.
Former Wall Street Journal editor in chief Matt Murray will serve as interim executive editor until the November election, at which point deputy editor of the Telegraph Media Group, Robert Winnett, will take over, the paper said in a press release.
Over the last three years under Buzbee’s leadership, the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” paper has come up short financially and journalistically. The paper lost more than $70 million in 2023 alone and has lost half of its audience since 2020.
Buzbee, an Associated Press alum, became the Post’s first female executive editor. While her predecessor, Marty Baron, was reportedly known for his top-down leadership style, Buzbee was “known as someone who listens to everyone in the room before making decisions,” according to the New York Times.
During her tenure, she oversaw the creation of a “Democracy” team at the paper in the wake of January 6. While the idea predated Buzbee, she helped make it a reality: a nine-person team within the National desk that counts reporters in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin among its members.
The idea that the institutions of democracy are under threat from the right came to inform much of the Post’s reporting under Buzbee. During her three-year tenure, the paper dedicated significant space to airing the concerns of left-wing activists and dismissing or distorting the concerns of those Americans who don’t share the progressive assumptions of the paper’s editors and reporters.
Today, we look at some of the best examples of that phenomenon.
Beginning with one of the most egregious examples: reporting that New York City mayor Eric Adams might not have approved the deployment of police to Columbia University’s campus during anti-Israel protests without pressure from Jewish “billionaires and business titans.”
“Overall, the messages offer a window into how some prominent individuals have wielded their money and power in an effort to shape American views of the Gaza war, as well as the actions of academic, business and political leaders — including New York’s mayor,” the Post’s report read.
New York City deputy mayor Fabien Levy and others were quick to call out the antisemitic undertones of the article. “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print,” Levy said.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that the Post seems to think it wasn’t necessary for the NYPD to get involved, even when students and outside agitators seized a building on campus — the outlet had previously characterized the anti-Israel protests as “antiwar demonstrations.”
But lackluster campus reporting is just one part of the paper’s larger failure to accurately and fairly cover the Israel–Hamas conflict.
As NR reported in January, foreign-policy and military experts agree that the paper had “on an almost daily basis, violated traditional journalistic principles that have shaped coverage of foreign conflicts by American newsrooms for decades.”
From the time between the October 7 terrorist attack to January, the paper had uncritically cited casualty figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry in 148 separate articles, according to a National Review analysis.
As Zach Kessel and Ari Blaff reported at the time:
The paper has passed off anti-Israel activists as neutral subject-matter experts, joined disreputable Middle Eastern media outlets in parroting long-standing antisemitic conspiracy theories, failed to reach out to Israeli officials before publishing an article critical of the Jewish state, and misrepresented an attack later revealed to be the result of Palestinian terror-group activity.
After the paper published a shocking report that the Israeli army had deliberately targeted Doctors Without Borders convoys, it was later forced to issue a correction: “An earlier version of this article reported incorrectly that Doctors Without Borders accused Israeli forces of deliberately firing on a convoy carrying employees of the organization and their family members in Gaza on Saturday, killing one and wounding one. Doctors Without Borders described and condemned the attack but did not name Israeli forces or any entity as its perpetrator. The article also misstated the number of people in the convoy; there were 137, not 140” (emphasis added).
The paper was also one of several outlets that claimed that Israel had bombed al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians. Instead, the explosion was not caused by Israel and occurred in a nearby parking lot — not at the hospital itself, and had a far lower death count.
And in November, the Post pulled a cartoon by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Ramirez after Buzbee said staffers and subscribers expressed “deep concern” over the cartoon, which satirized Hamas’s claims that Israel targets Gazan children by depicting the terrorist group’s spokesman, Ghazi Hamadi, using kids as human shields.
“The reaction to the image convinced me that I had missed something profound, and divisive, and I regret that,” wrote opinion editor David Shipley in a note atop letters from readers taking issue with the cartoon. “Our section is aimed at finding commonalities, understanding the bonds that hold us together, even in the darkest times. In this spirit, we have taken down the drawing.”
Meanwhile, on the issue of LGBT rights in the Middle East, the paper somehow twisted itself into knots attempting to blame American Republicans.
Washington Post reporter Mohamad El Chamaa claimed in an article that Middle Eastern countries that have shut down local LGBT pride events are actually “echoing efforts by prominent American conservatives.”
“Anti-LGBTQ backlash grows across Middle East, echoing U.S. culture wars,” the report says.
“Across the Middle East, LGBTQ communities face a growing crackdown, echoing efforts by prominent American conservatives to restrict the rights of gay and transgender people and erase their influence from society,” the article continues, citing incidents in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey.
While the report notes LGBT rights are a “legal gray area” in the aforementioned countries, it fails to mention the Middle Eastern countries where homosexuality is a crime.
Republicans are also allegedly to blame for a rise in young women who are skeptical of the birth-control pill, according to the Washington Post.
It’s not that the internet has empowered women to educate themselves and take control of their health care; instead, young women have fallen victim to “misinformation” peddled by nefarious right-wing influencers.
“Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion,” the Post claimed. Such “misinformation” includes videos made by women who claim that they’ve suffered from symptoms of hormonal birth control — depression, anxiety, weight gain, blood clots, and infertility — leading them to turn to natural family-planning alternatives. As evidence of the scale of the problem, the Post points out that TikTok removed “at least five videos” that linked birth control to “mental health issues and other health problems” in response to questions from the Post about how the company combats “misinformation.”
Yet it is widely accepted that hormonal contraception can increase the risk of breast and cervical cancers, according to the National Cancer Institute. It can also cause a number of other side effects: nausea, migraines, weight gain, hormonal mood shifts, and decreased libido.
For all the bias the paper has shown against Israel and Republicans, it has failed to employ the same scrutiny for TikTok.
Because TikTok’s parent company is based in China, lawmakers have expressed concern that it would be required to comply with Chinese laws requiring companies to provide the CCP with access to user data and other proprietary information.
Among the laundry list of concerns surrounding the massively popular short-form-video app: ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based owner, has allegedly spied on American citizens, including several tech journalists; the app has the ability to boost or censor videos in response to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party; the platform’s trends and filters threaten the mental health and safety of American children; and, of course, TikTok has a huge collection of user information, including biometric location data for more than 100 million users in America alone.
But over at the Washington Post, no one seems too concerned.
“If the goal is to plug the holes in the U.S. information sphere, banning TikTok and other foreign apps might be like a Band-Aid on a colander,” WaPo’s technology news analysis writer Will Oremus wrote in an “analysis” piece.
And another Washington Post piece excerpted from the paper’s newsletter The Tech Friend suggests lawmakers must make a better argument than, “Trust us, TikTok is bad.” The article quotes former Biden White House adviser on tech and competition policy Tim Wu. “If you’re going to take something from the American public, we need to tell them why,” Wu said.
The paper also deployed PR-like coverage for special counsel Jack Smith, who is “known to enjoy biking and has completed more than 100 triathlons and at least nine Ironman competitions around the world,” and Tennessee drag queens who “feared it was their final hour — and gave it their all.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Politico apparently hasn’t been paying close attention to the motivations of Democratic Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg the last few years. “This reluctant prosecutor just made Donald Trump a felon,” reads a new headline from the outlet.
“The Harlem Democrat, who at times seemed like a reluctant participant in a trial he launched, secured a place in history as the first prosecutor to land the conviction of an American president,” the report explains.
Reluctant? Apparently Politico missed the part where Bragg campaigned on prosecuting Trump.
Media Misses
• Longtime South Florida Sun Sentinel columnist Fred Grimm announced in a column on Friday that he has chosen to retire after 56 years in the industry in part because he can no longer stand writing about the “gay-bashing authoritarian dystopia” that is the Sunshine State.
“Not that it hasn’t been fun chronicling Florida’s descent into a waterlogged, python-infested, uninsurable, hurricane-pummeled, book-banning, gay-bashing authoritarian dystopia, but I’m outta here,” Grimm writes.
He later adds: “A nasty, mutant strain of populism has taken hold of Florida and the rest of red-state America. Facts don’t matter. Medical science is rejected. Literary masterpieces are banned. Abortion is outlawed. Teachers are persecuted. Disney is villainized. MAGA pols, up to their shins in sunny-day flooding, deny that we’re in the throes of global warming.”
• Several USA Today network newspapers in Louisiana removed an op-ed written by Senator John Kennedy (R., La.) on the arguments against biological men competing in women’s sports. The papers removed the piece from their websites without telling Kennedy, according to Fox News, and replaced it with an error message. USA Today parent company Gannett told the outlet that Kennedy’s writing “did not meet our ethical guidelines, which state we will treat people with respect.”
• MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell shamelessly called Bragg “the anointed one” after Trump’s conviction last week. He noted the Harvard Crimson had given Bragg the nickname when he graduated in 1995. “That’s the right title. That’s who this guy is,” he said.