The Washington Post’s editorial board need not bother with a general election endorsement for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, should she win the Democratic nomination.
It is clear already that the newspaper is all in for the Massachusetts lawmaker. The tell is in its coverage, which has been both glowing and reflexively defensive of the senator and her 2020 candidacy.
On Wednesday evening, for example, the Washington Post published a news report defending Warren’s dubious claim that she was fired in 1971 from her job at an elementary school after only one year because she was “visibly pregnant.”
“Conservatives claim Elizabeth Warren lied about pregnancy firing. Women reality-checked them on social media,” reads the Washington Post news headline.
The entire article is mostly just a litany of women who claim they were discriminated against when they were pregnant, including one who claims she “felt the need to look back at this painful chapter in her own life” after “conservative commentators began to cast doubt on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign-trail assertion that she was discriminated against while pregnant as a schoolteacher in the early 1970s.”
The report then adds:
Putting aside for a moment the stupidity of a defense that amounts to little more than “because someone experienced discrimination, Warren must also have experienced discrimination,” the most notable thing about the Washington Post report is what is not mentioned.
Namely, the article makes no mention of contemporaneous school documents and local news reports indicating that Warren might have lied about this. She appears to have left Riverdale Elementary School of her own accord. There is no mention of minutes from a 1971 Riverdale Board of Education meeting, which were obtained first by the Washington Free Beacon, showing its members voted unanimously to extend Warren a “2nd year” contract. The Washington Post report makes no mention of the June 16, 1971, record showing the board accepted Warren’s resignation “with regret.”
The article also makes no mention of a 1971 local news report claiming that Warren “resigned for personal reasons.”
All of these details are brushed off in favor of the theory that the controversy this week about Warren’s heroic tale of workplace discrimination is the product of the right-wing’s fake news machine. In fact, the Washington Post report even says of Warren’s inconsistent 2007 version of events — when she suggested she left Riverdale after one year over a certification issue — that “Republicans and Twitter commentators” are using her own words “as supposed evidence that she has been misleading.”
“Supposed.”
There is not a moment’s thought given to the idea that Warren, who has been already caught telling lies about her personal background, would exaggerate or even fib about what happened to her in 1971 at Riverdale. There is not a moment’s consideration for the fact that this “visibly pregnant” business is essentially Warren’s word against school board documents, contemporaneous news reports, and even her own 2007 version of events.
But if you think this is bad, just consider that this Washington Post report is just one of a half-dozen stories the paper has published this week in defense of Warren’s questionable pregnancy story. Its additional news and commentary headlines include:
– ‘The Elizabeth Warren pregnancy smear shows how poisoned the media world is’
– ‘As some question Warren’s pregnancy-discrimination claim, women tweet their own stories’
– ‘Years after Warren left teaching, scrutiny of her story is bringing pregnancy discrimination to the fore’
– ‘Elizabeth Warren, pregnancy discrimination and the stories we tell’
– ‘Sen. Elizabeth Warren reiterates she was fired from a teaching job because she was pregnant’
This flavor of pro-Warren sycophancy from the Washington Post should surprise no one. After all, this is the same newspaper that published the following news and opinion headlines in 2018 following the release of Warren’s disastrous DNA test, which showed she is anywhere between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American and for which she later issued several apologies:
– ‘Trump dared Elizabeth Warren to take a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry. Now what?’
– ‘Yes, Elizabeth Warren has Native ancestry. No, that won’t stop Trump’s racist attacks’
Also, this is the same newspaper that published a straight-faced news report in September titled, and I am not making this up, “Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?”
What I am trying to tell you is this: The Washington Post would like very much for Elizabeth Warren to be the next president of the United States; it will say, do, and ignore whatever it takes to get her there.
