Wall Street Journal's Defense Of Trump's Lie-Filled Letter Backfires Badly
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Some people want to let sleeping dogs lie, but the Wall Street Journal prefers to let ex-presidents lie.
On Wednesday, the newspaper printed a letter to the editor from former President Donald Trump where he basically regurgitated all the demonstrably false claims he’s already made about the 2020 election.
The paper came under fire for letting Trump spread false information without any sort of fact check.
On Thursday, the paper’s editorial board defended the decision to print Trump’s letter without any kind of factual pushback by claiming that it trusts it readers “to make up their own minds about his statement.”
The editorial added, “And we think it’s news when an ex-President who may run in 2024 wrote what he did, even if (or perhaps especially if) his claims are bananas.”
The editorial board justified printing Trump’s election lies without clarification by claiming that “Mr. Trump is making these claims elsewhere, so we hardly did him a special favor by letting him respond to our editorial.”
Editors said that the paper offers “the same courtesy to others we criticize, even when they make allegations we think are false,” and decried attempts by the media to censor the former president by saying journalists should “examine their own standards after they fell so easily for false Russian collusion claims.”
But the Journal’s defense of its decision to not actually do journalism didn’t get much support on Twitter, based on the responses.
It’s fun to use journalism to justify not doing journalism. https://t.co/kRw5l9upKV
— Joel Mathis (@joelmmathis) October 28, 2021
If there is one thing we have learned, it's that lots of Americans are quite good at parsing voter fraud claims. https://t.co/UPAqHkaGAR
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) October 28, 2021
we printed all of Trump’s lies w/o comment bc we knew our GOP readers would suss them out
dear Lord https://t.co/RKIUJBkme0— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) October 28, 2021
WSJ editorial board, which is not in the business of breaking news, says it is breaking news by publishing Trump's lies, which aren't news https://t.co/Ihwvfk9npa
— John McQuaid (@johnmcquaid) October 28, 2021
this only makes remote sense if the letter in question could simply not be read/published anywhere else.
if the letter is bananas and that is news? you write an article about the event you just witnessed (prez sends "bananas letter"); you don't have to publish the letter. https://t.co/1KFdnjyrof— jay cowit (@jaycowit) October 28, 2021
I mean this is such bullshit. You are under no obligation to print provable lies from anyone, especially when those lies led to an attempted coup and the deaths of multiple people. You printed this because you wanted to print it. FOH with your journalistic nobility. https://t.co/QUVJsmeeF1
— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) October 28, 2021
You're not giving people a chance to “make up their own minds” if you provide only present one size and include absolutely 0 fact-checking or context. And especially if you're calling his writings "news," as the WSJ ed board does, you have even more of an obligation to fact check https://t.co/WApmDWwzut
— Grace Panetta (@grace_panetta) October 28, 2021
"What he wrote is news even if it's wrong," is the clearest distillation of the larger inability to cover Trump properly I have seen. Thanks, WSJ. https://t.co/OYJwngZ413
— Tim Hogan (@timjhogan) October 28, 2021
The idea that you just print outright lies and then let your readers sort it out is, oh, what’s the word?
Wrong? Ridiculous? Naive? Stupid? Backwards? Foolish? Misguided? Unhinged? Ignorant? Thoughtless? Insincere? Mistaken? Dubious? Unreasonable?
Really, all of those work. https://t.co/4azfRNmIbS— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) October 28, 2021
"we trust our readers to make up their own minds" means "we were either too lazy or wanted the clicks badly enough to do the work" https://t.co/QD69YRS3sb
— Gene Park (@GenePark) October 28, 2021
Alternate headline: we are cool with printing lies https://t.co/kdjvTzbHj2
— Joan Esposito (@JoanEspositoCHI) October 28, 2021
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
