Trust in the media is at a “near record low,” according to an October 2022 Gallup poll. A mere seven percent of Americans have a “great deal” of trust and confidence in the media. Notably, the survey is “the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined.”The Washington Post is one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the world. And it has gone without a standards desk for years. Instead, the media conglomerate has maintained a part time reader’s representative. As I can personally attest in my numerous interactions with the Post, this arrangement has hardly been sufficient. More has been needed — as Gallup’s poll readily shows.Recently announced changes, however, might offer some hope.On Dec. 11, 2022, the Post announced the creation of a standards desk, to be helmed by Meghan Ashford-Grooms and Carrie Camillo. The former was deputy copy chief at Kaiser Health News. Camillo has been with the Post since 2002.They are entering what is, no doubt, a challenging assignment at a challenging time — both for media in general and for the Washington Post itself, which recently announced major layoffs and the elimination of huge sections, including Outlook.One longstanding area of concern for the newspaper — and one that Ashford-Grooms and Camillo should pay attention to — is the Post’s coverage of the Middle East and Israel.Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi Arabian dissident who “wrote” a column for the Post prior to his 2018 disappearance and murder in a Saudi consulate in Turkey. After his tragic death, Khashoggi was hailed as a martyr to journalism. Washington DC officials even named a street near the Saudi Embassy after him.Yet, Khashoggi didn’t even write his own columns. The Washington Post admitted as much.Buried in a Dec. 22, 2018, article that appeared shortly before Christmas of that year, the Post revealed that “text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government.”The newspaper also acknowledged that Khashoggi “appears to have relied on a researcher and translator affiliated with the organization.” Further, as the Security Studies Group, a Washington DC-based think tank, noted: “We heard from reliable sources familiar with the investigation [into his death] that documents showing wire transfers[of money] from Qatar were found in his apartment in Turkey,” but were “immediately put out of reach by Turkish security services, so they did not show the collusion between Khashoggi, Qatar, and Turkey prior his death.”

Suffice [it] to say: this is scandalous. And it’s equally lamentable that the Washington Post has, in the intervening years, failed to offer any additional details or make any necessary changes. It raises the question of whether other countries or entities have used Post column space for influence operations, breaking promises to disclose any conflicting interests and assurances that they themselves authored their own articles — both of which are standard operating fare when submitting columns.The newspaper’s coverage of Israel has long been replete with double standards, bias, and misleading omissions. Indeed, as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) has documented, the newspaper perennially omits the numerous instances in which Israel and the United States have offered Palestinian leaders a state. For example, in more than a decade, the Post ran dozens of stories relating to a “two-state solution” — only to omit that one party, Palestinian leadership, responsible for rejecting that “solution.” Nor is this the only problem relating to the Post’s coverage of Israel….