“Journalism,” Phil Graham famously said, “is the first rough draft of history.” Over at the Washington Post, once owned by the Graham family, history is indeed being made. On June 2, 2024, the Washington Post announced that its top editor for the past few years, Sally Buzbee, would be leaving, as she has overseen a period when America’s second-most storied newspaper has lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Matt Murray, who previously led the Wall Street Journal, was announced as the interim executive editor. Robert Winnett, formerly with the U.K.’s Telegraph, will succeed Murray after the presidential election. Both have their work cut out for them.
Will Lewis, the Washington Post’s publisher, spoke with staff. “We are losing large amounts of money,” Lewis reportedly said. “Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.” In reply, he received complaints that the newspaper will now be run exclusively by “white men” and defenses of the objectively failing reporting and opinion products that blamed the very management which has been spending some $77 million per year at the 2023 rate of loss subsidizing Washington Post journalists.
The Washington Post has made several attempts to stanch the bleeding, including cutting its outlook section and offering mass buyouts for veteran staff. As Lewis told the newsroom, the Washington Post must “take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path.” Part of that action will include setting up a “third newsroom” whose purpose, an internal memo said, “is to give millions of Americans — who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed — compelling, exciting, and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.”
However, as the old D.C. saw goes, personnel is policy. And in key respects, the Washington Post has ceased to offer “traditional news.” The newspaper has become so widely out of step with popular opinion in the United States, as well as common decency, basis in evidence, and an attachment to common sense and self-correction and critique. Nowhere is this truer of the Washington Post’s coverage than on Middle Eastern affairs, where the paper suggests the half-true slogan “go woke, go broke,” might be modified to “go Hamas, go homeless.” (“Go Khomeini, get no money”? Look, puns are hard. But the analysis holds.) WaPo’s coverage of the Israel-Islamist conflict, including the recent war against Hamas and other Iranian proxies, provides a harrowing look at how fringe the Washington Post has become.
On Oct. 7, 2023 — when Hamas terrorists, other Iranian proxies, and ad hoc groups of Gazans invaded Israel and murdered over 1,200 people, taking 240, including Americans, hostage, and beginning an attack that continues in the form of rocket barrages to this day — the Washington Post and its staff stood at the ready to put their resources and energies to work on the wrong side, the side that terms the country where the Washington Post is headquartered “the Great Satan.”
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah “liked” and shared a post praising the attacks as “decolonization.” She later penned a column drawing equivalency between the pogromists of today and their victims. Prior to Israel’s response, Attiah warned that Jerusalem was about to commit an “atrocity.” She has since accused the Jewish state of “genocide” — overlooking numerous steps Israel has taken to reduce civilian casualties, including some of the largest evacuations of civilians ever undertaken in urban combat.
Attiah’s comments are unsurprising. As an opinion editor, she published op-eds by the Houthis, an Iranian proxy that has joined Hamas in launching attacks against Israel and whose motto is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews.” Yet her professed concern for Gazans seems selective at best. In 2019, during the so-called Hunger Revolution, Hamas shot and attacked Palestinians protesting living conditions. Attiah couldn’t even be bothered to post about it.
In an Oct. 23, 2023, post, Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor allowed that Oct. 7 was a “bad thing,” but added that it doesn’t justify other “bad things.” Like Attiah, his analysis of Israeli military tactics minimizes or ignores the fact that Hamas uses human shields, including using hospitals, schools, and U.N. buildings to plot and launch attacks.
In addition to featuring columnists like Attiah, Tharoor, and Shadi Hamid (formerly of the Qatar-funded Brookings Institution), the Washington Post’s newsroom has continued to report unsubstantiated and obviously untrue claims from Hamas as fact. This has led to several embarrassing episodes. Somehow journalists at the Washington Post are unable to discern the obvious — that Hamas has both a clear incentive to lie about casualties and a history of precisely doing that.
For example, on Oct. 17, 2023, several news outlets repeated the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health’s claims that the Israel Defense Forces struck al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, killing hundreds. In fact, U.S. and other intelligence assessments have concluded that it was likely a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short, striking the hospital parking lot and killing anywhere from 10 to 50 people. But the damage was done. The decision to treat Hamas’s claims as credible led to rioting across the Middle East, including attacks on U.S. embassies. Subsequently, in an Oct. 20 press conference, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters, “I would not take anything that Hamas says at face value. I’m not sure anyone in this room would take at face value or report something that ISIS had said [and] the same applies to Hamas.”
And, of course! Even historians given open access to medical and government records struggle to ascertain exact or even sometimes close figures for casualties in even decades-old wars, something all journalists should take as a blaring alarm bell warning to be cautious about the very precise, as well as obviously inflated, numbers provided by Hamas’s Gaza Ministry of Health — even if it were not propaganda communications from a designated foreign terrorist organization. So, this could have been a learning moment. But not for the Washington Post. On May 27, the Washington Post ran a story titled, “Israeli strikes on Rafah safe zone kill at least 35, Gaza officials say.” However, the “Gaza official” who served as the article’s source, Muhammad Abu Hani, is a member of Hamas. His claim — Israeli strikes on humanitarian safe zone Block 2371 killed dozens — was proven false within hours. Instead of issuing a retraction, apology, or correction, the Washington Post deleted the entire article without explanation.
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On June 8, Israel carried out a daring and complex hostage rescue mission, saving the lives of four Israelis being held captive in a densely populated market in central Gaza. Hamas operatives attempted to kill the hostages, and a gun battle ensued. The Washington Post’s headline? “More than 200 Palestinians killed in Israeli hostage raid in Gaza.” The newspaper’s source? Once again, the Ministry of Health. One of the Hamas operatives killed in the firefight, Abdallah Aljamal, was a “journalist” for the Palestine Chronicle, as well as a spokesman for another Hamas ministry. Aljamal was reportedly holding three of the four Israelis hostage in his home. As a spokesman for a Hamas ministry, Aljamal was precisely the sort of person who the Washington Post would quote as a nameless “Gaza official.”
The chief problem with the newspaper that, as it loves to remind us, broke Watergate, isn’t just its extreme views. Rather, it’s the lack of straight and reliable reporting that can be seen nowhere so much as on issues relating to Israel. The Washington Post trusts Hamas because it wants to trust Hamas. Many of its columnists and, apparently, not a few of its reporters parrot the line that Israel is uniquely evil and, accordingly, had it coming. The future for such a paper is bleak. And it should be.
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.