The civil war started by the young wokes of the New York Times succeeded not just in forcing the ousters of opinion editors James Bennet and Jim Dao but also in sending shockwaves of terror among senior editors of newsrooms across the country. Eager to be eaten last by the revolution, two reporters and at least one editor at the Washington Post evidently violated their own rules so as not to fall prey to the mob.
Last week, the Washington Post featured an inexplicably published, 3,000 word, double-bylined investigation of a Halloween party from two years ago. The central players of the party were not politicians, celebrities, or even reporters at the Washington Post, though it was held at the home of the paper’s cartoonist, Tom Toles. No, the central plot of the story featured Lexie Gruber and Lyric Prince, two people no one had ever heard of before, bullying out of the party a liberal woman wearing blackface to mock Megyn Kelly.
Why was that even a story? That’s what the entire media wondered for a week and what Olivia Nuzzi and Josh Barro of New York magazine set out to discover. The answer renders the story even more obscene.
As reporters Marc Fisher and Sydney Trent noted in the original article, the story was brought to the paper’s attention only because Gruber, a management consultant at a second-tier firm, had emailed the Washington Post about it because she was “reflecting” on it “after the killing of George Floyd and the protests.” In Gruber’s endless Twitter fulminating, she claimed she did so because she only wanted to identify the woman who wore blackface, not get the story published in national news. But that excuse never made sense, and thanks to the scathing reporting of Barro and Nuzzi, it’s clear that it was nothing more than a lie to cover her obvious motive: Get the Washington Post to cover the story with the veiled threat of selling it to another outlet and smearing the paper in the process.
Nuzzi and Barro report:
It isn’t unusual for a reporter working on an as-yet-unreported story to ask sources or subjects if they are talking to other outlets; reporters are competitive and tend to value being first. And the Post denied that Fisher linked the paper’s interest in running the story to the likelihood that the news would otherwise get out elsewhere. Coratti, the Post spokesperson, said Fisher only told [the woman who wore blackface at the party] that the two party guests who brought the story to the Post might take it elsewhere in response to a question from [the woman who wore blackface at the party] about whether they might do so.
But a second person interviewed by Fisher said, “He expressed his misgivings about the story to me.” This person said that the impression Fisher left was that he had been told to do the story and that it was not his decision.
A third person interviewed by Fisher recounted a similar exchange. “He told me that from a personal perspective, he didn’t think this story necessarily warranted being out there, and that was his personal opinion,” this person said. “He chalked it up to other senior editors at the Post saying it has to go, and he claimed it was out of his hands even though he wrote it.” (“Our editors don’t ‘force’ people to write stories,” Coratti said.)
Furthermore, Nuzzi and Barro note that the Washington Post violated two of its own editorial guidelines: first by publishing a story that didn’t meet the paper’s strict editorial standards about relevance and second by taking down the dramatically staged photos of Prince and Gruber posing — at Prince and Gruber’s request.
Despite the Washington Post’s unwillingness to fess up to or even defend how and why it got a nonpublic figure fired, what happened is clear as day: Gruber threatened the Washington Post, and terrified of the mob, a rogue editor decided to get ahead of the story and publish it to neutralize the threat.
Media malpractice aside, the real mistake the paper made was believing that feeding the mob means that they’ll get eaten last. The mob already smells blood in the water, and if it’s willing to burn down the New York Times’s opinion section for publishing a senator’s opinion with which 58% of the nation agrees, it’ll come after anyone else for anything. Just as book burning doesn’t end with Mein Kampf and statue toppling doesn’t end with Columbus, the war on the free press will stop only when its targets refuse to act like hostages.
It’s not as though the Washington Post wouldn’t have support. Barro and Nuzzi’s story makes clear that everyone not involved with the story found it reprehensible, as did the rest of the industry. And for better or for worse, refusing to bend the knee and apologize largely works in legacy media. Consider that after claiming that homophobic remarks were added to her blog by hackers rather than apologize, Joy Reid is now being rewarded by MSNBC with a prime-time spot. Jimmy Fallon refused to apologize for wearing blackface decades ago, and unlike Kelly, who didn’t even wear blackface but instead argued that people who wore blackface in a costume like Fallon ought not be canceled) Fallon wasn’t given so much as a slap on the wrist by NBC. Stopping the mob requires that the most elite echelons of media treat the mob like the crybaby bullies its members are.
Until then, a robust Fourth Estate will continue to asphyxiate itself in a slow, sad assisted suicide.
