A series of public spats between employees has revealed the Washington Post’s priorities.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we explore what the latest Taylor Lorenz misadventure says about the Washington Post, dissect the dishonest reaction to the Sussmann verdict, and hit more media misses.
The Post’s Priorities
Taylor Lorenz continues to be a newsmaker at the Washington Post, though not in the way her editors might have hoped.
Last week, Lorenz wrote that two YouTube creators had not responded to requests for comment. But that was, as the creators pointed out, not true. Lorenz had not so much as reached out.
“I can confirm that she did not reach out to me at all until I called her out on Twitter. After I did, she reached out to me by Twitter DM,” one of the YouTubers, Alyte Mazeika, told National Review last week. Lorenz had also neglected to mention in the story — ostensibly about the way creators had covered the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial — that Mazeika is an attorney who frequently covers legal issues on her channel.
The editor’s note now affixed to the Lorenz story reads: “The first published version of this story stated incorrectly that Internet influencers Alyte Mazeika and ThatUmbrellaGuy had been contacted for comment before publication. In fact, only Mazeika was asked, via Instagram. After the story was published, The Post continued to seek comment from Mazeika via social media and queried ThatUmbrellaGuy for the first time. During that process, The Post removed the incorrect statement from the story but did not note its removal, a violation of our corrections policy. The story has been updated to note that Mazeika declined to comment for this story and ThatUmbrellaGuy could not be reached for comment. A previous version of this story also inaccurately attributed a quote to Adam Waldman, a lawyer for Johnny Depp. The quote described how he contacted some Internet influencers and has been removed.”
Not great, but Lorenz’s personal response to the error was worse. Since the falsehood was pointed out, the writer has laid the blame at the feet of “my editor,” “a miscommunication,” and the two creators themselves. She’s also blamed “bad faith campaigns,” CNN’s Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, and “far right disinfo” for the reaction to her dishonesty.
Meanwhile, the Post has been much more wrapped up with national political correspondent Dave Weigel’s retweet of the joke: “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”
Weigel’s retweet was quickly chased by a mea culpa — “I just removed a retweet of an offensive joke. I apologize and did not mean to cause any harm” — but it was too late. He was already being denounced by national political reporter Felicia Somnez, who all but called for his firing.
Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed! pic.twitter.com/zs4dX4qprH
— Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) June 3, 2022
Somnez has spent the last several days crusading against Weigel on Twitter, feuding with Jose A. Del Real, another colleague, who critiqued her for her “regular public bullying” and claim that the Post is not a “safe workplace.” Online, the fighting got so toxic that executive editor Sally Buzbee felt compelled to send an email asking that reporters treat each other with “kindness and respect” and bring issues to internal leadership rather than to social media.
Somnez responded by publicly attacking Buzbee for the email.
That Somnez and the newsroom as a whole seem more concerned by Weigel’s lapse in judgment than Lorenz’s now-habitually corrosive behavior would seem to be a bigger issue than either.
Suspect Sussmann Takeaways
Unsurprisingly, the acquittal of former Democratic attorney Michael Sussmann has led Democratic partisans in the media to a number of stray conclusions. Special counsel John Durham, appointed to examine the origins of the investigation into ties between Donald Trump and Russia, is said to have been sent on a wild goose chase.
At the Washington Post, Dana Milbank writes that Durham has “essentially nothing to show” for his investigation, accuses Durham of having “packed his court filings with innuendo,” and summarizes the trial by concluding that “the jury dismissed Durham’s bull.”
Absent from Milbank’s analysis is any evidence that he watched the trial, or even knows what Sussmann was charged with.
For those who did follow the case, it was obvious that it was technicalities and shoddy pre-trial work, not a dearth of evidence, that did in Durham’s team. Durham’s charge was proven beyond any reasonable doubt: Sussmann did lie to FBI general counsel James Baker in saying that he wasn’t acting on behalf of a client when he came forward with evidence alleging a connection between Trump’s company and Russia’s Alfa Bank. In reality, billing records revealed during the trial made it plain that he was working on the allegations on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Unfortunately for prosecutors, they charged Sussmann with having lied on September 19, 2016, during a meeting with Baker at FBI headquarters. Baker’s word and notes taken by two agents who spoke with Baker after his meeting with Sussmann served as evidence for the charge.
Sussmann told that exact lie on September 18 in a text sent to Baker, but because it was only found this March, after the statute of limitations elapsed, Sussmann could not be convicted for that specific lie, in that specific instance.
Milbank scoffs at the idea that the trial uncovered any evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign played a key role in advancing the Trump-Russia narrative. But the trial made clear that Franklin Foer’s Slate article about the Trump-Alfa Bank allegations was the direct result of lobbying from Team Clinton. Moreover, Clinton’s campaign manager offered sworn testimony that Clinton herself approved the leaking of the allegations to the press, and admitted that the campaign was unsure of its veracity.
Similarly, Jonathan Chait of New York magazine took a victory lap, calling the charge against Sussmann “threadbare” while again conveniently ignoring the existence of the September 18 message — a task that would have been impossible for anyone putting the slightest effort into keeping up with the case.
Chait further undermined his credibility on the matter when he incorrectly stated that Durham has had no successful prosecutions — the FBI’s Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to having falsified materials to secure the Carter Page FISA warrant — and when he stated that computer scientists “were not sure if the server was a communications link between Trump and Russia and wanted the FBI to investigate.”
Those paying attention knew this to be false. The “white papers” summarizing the flimsy evidence against Trump included the assertion that a secret communications channel between Trump and Alfa Bank were “the only plausible explanation.” Communications between the white paper’s author — Sussmann client and tech executive Rodney Joffe — and other experts presented by the prosecution, meanwhile, prove that they knew the evidence was far less compelling than they described it as to the press and FBI.
Sussmann’s acquittal may be an indictment of the prosecution’s pre-trial work, but not of Durham’s broader mission.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Guardian reports that “Legal claims shed light on founder of faith group tied to Amy Coney Barrett,” reporting on decades-old allegations against the founders of People of Praise, a mostly-Catholic Christian organization of which Barrett is a member.
Barrett lived at the home of those founders, Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan, during law school. No formal evidence of any wrongdoing has been found, and no allegations of Barrett ever having been aware of coercive or abusive behavior by them exist.
The purpose of the story, and especially its Barrett-centric headline, becomes clear in paragraph five: “The examination of the People of Praise’s history and attitude towards women comes as a majority of the supreme court — including Barrett — appear poised to reverse Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal across the US.”
Media Misses
• It must’ve been a slow news weekend over at CNN because the network saw fit to publish an entire article about several players on the Tampa Bay Rays who “did not wear LGBTQ logos on their uniforms for the team’s Pride Night celebration during Saturday’s game against the Chicago White Sox.” CNN’s hard-hitting missive is not even based on its own reporting — the piece is based on original reporting from the Tampa Bay Times.
Several players on the Tampa Bay Rays did not wear LGBTQ logos on their uniforms for the team’s Pride Night celebration during Saturday’s game against the Chicago White Sox. https://t.co/AIrjZLHNlU
— CNN (@CNN) June 6, 2022
• As several recent mass shootings have brought gun control to the forefront of the public conversation, many outlets and public figures have proved they have no business joining the discussion, with many in the mainstream media demonstrating profound ignorance about guns.
Former Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, who served in the Army in the early 1970s, said Thursday he does not believe Americans should be using automatic weapons outside of the armed forces.
“The people that are suffering are people that need you,” Krzyzewski said. “Like, why don’t you? Come on. You know? What the hell are we doing? You know, we’re not taking care of our people. And we can go into the guns. Like, you need an automatic weapon? You gotta be kidding me. You got to be kidding me. It’s disgusting.”
Yet Krzyzewski — and Sports Illustrated, which published his comments — failed to acknowledge that an automatic weapon has never been used in a mass shooting and are available to civilians only in rare cases.
• MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was another media figure to spread disinformation about guns, claiming recently that AR-15s are “deadlier” than the M16s used during the Vietnam War. However, the AR-15 is semi-automatic, firing one round for each pull of the trigger, while M16s are fully automatic.
Joe Scarborough says AR-15s are "deadlier" than the M16s used during the Vietnam War.
That is completely false. The M16s used during Vietnam were fully automatic.
We need to stick to the facts and the truth when discussing guns. pic.twitter.com/PW4JtuSCZb
— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) June 6, 2022