Because Jeff Bezos has taken a wrecking ball to The Washington Post’s opinion section, critics have become sensitive to any hint that the billionaire owner is paying obeisance to Donald Trump.
Which brings me to an op-ed the Post published Tuesday evening (gift link) by newly confirmed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro about Trump’s decision to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., in order to crack down on a crime wave that, by all credible accounts, does not exist. I haven’t been able to find any media commentary criticizing the Post for running Pirro’s piece, but I have seen grumbling on social media along with yet another round of vows by readers to cancel their subscriptions.
Deciding whether to run such a piece is not just a journalistic decision but also an ethical one. Pirro’s major qualification for her job as D.C.’s top prosecutor is having served as a Trump-worshipping talk-show host on Fox News, although it has to be said that she served as both a prosecutor and a judge many years ago. Her op-ed defends an authoritarian president who is militarizing the nation’s capital just because he can. Should the Post have just said no?
The Post itself editorialized against her appointment (gift link) back in May. Part of the paper’s objection was over process, but the editorial also called out her judgment and noted that her executive producer at Fox News had referred to her as a “reckless maniac” in promoting the voting-machine conspiracy that led to a $787.5 million libel settlement by her then-employer.
Which is to say that the Post’s editorial board, compromised though it may be, saw fit to stand up to Pirro and Trump as recently as three months ago. No doubt the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, decided to run Pirro’s op-ed for the most ordinary of reasons: it was submitted (if not necessarily written) by a high-ranking government official with responsibility for a significant issue in the news.
In that regard, it’s useful to remember the mess over The New York Times’ decision to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton back in 2020 in which Cotton endorsed the use of military force to crush violent Black Lives Matter protesters. As I wrote for GBH News, the Times shouldn’t have run the piece for several reasons. Among other things, the editors did not insist that Cotton address an earlier public statement he’d made suggesting that violent protesters should be killed on the streets, and he was allowed to make an entirely unsubstantiated assertion that antifa was involved in the protests.
We later learned that editorial-page editor James Bennet hadn’t even bothered to read Cotton’s screed before publishing it. Bennet, whose miscues were piling up (including his inserting a false assertion into an editorial that led to Sarah Palin’s endless libel suit against the Times), was soon fired.
Pirro’s op-ed strikes me as unremarkable right-wing boilerplate about what she describes as a need to crack down on youthful offenders. She calls on the D.C. Council to amend or reverse three laws that would strip those offenders of important rights and protections. The op-ed says in part:
Unfortunately, young criminals have been emboldened to think they can get away with committing crime in this city, and, very often, they do. But together with our local and federal partners, our message to them today is: We will identify you, prosecute you and convict you. For any juveniles: We are going to push to change the laws so that if you commit any violent crime, I have jurisdiction to prosecute you where you belong — in adult court.
Don’t get me wrong. This is terrible, vile stuff, but the question is whether the Post should have run her op-ed. I think the answer is yes. It’s a newsworthy piece by a public official who’s close to the president. If I were editing the piece, I would have insisted that she address the falling crime rate in D.C. (As a general principle, I think editorial-page editors need to insist on standards of truthfulness and accuracy in outside contributions.) Overall, though, I don’t think Pirro’s piece is nearly as objectionable as Cotton’s was five years ago.
The Post, given its location in the nation’s capital, has always been a favored landing spot for op-eds by high-ranking government officials. The best way to have prevented Pirro’s op-ed from running would have been to keep Trump out of the White House. But it’s far too late for that.