As the mainstream media piled on to deny President Donald Trump credit for eliminating ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi this weekend, the nation’s most self-important broadsheet somehow came out on top with an absurd headline humanizing the jihadist as an “austere religious scholar.”
For many critics of the liberal media, it confirms why the media is distrusted, and why papers like the Washington Post and The New York Times have lost much of their prestige. Indeed, the Post’s obituary headline occasions reflection on its own decline and death, as author Bill Asher puts it in a much-deserved takedown of the paper’s shamelessness at American Greatness.
Writer: WaPo is dead
With its snooty motto, “Democracy dies in darkness,” the Washington Post lends itself easily to criticism of the mainstream media. The slogan perfectly encapsulates the self-importance, dishonesty, factual distortions, and perhaps self-deception that appear to guide the paper in its war against the president.
When U.S. Special Forces took out the world’s most wanted terrorist this weekend, naturally, WaPo distinguished itself amid the mainstream media’s reactive, knee-jerk responses. The Post has been righteously lampooned over an initial headline for an obituary on al-Baghdadi that described him as an “austere religious scholar.”
The headline was later stealth-edited to conform with more conventional, down-home sensibilities of those who think that jihadism is evil, but not before inspiring a torrent of parodies on social media. In a parallel scenario, some said, the Post might well have summarized Adolf Hitler’s life as that of a “vegetarian and community organizer.”
While we’re on the subject of death notices, it’s worth checking in on how one of the nation’s leading papers is doing. Asher summarizes the Post’s moribund state in a devastating bit of prose that calls up some of its past moral and investigative failures (It’s short. Read the whole thing.)
This is how the Post describes the leader of a regime of nihilist animals who enslaved, tormented, raped and brutally beheaded untold numbers of innocents, apparently: as an “austere religious scholar” in “wireframe glasses.” They’ll lionize a terrorist, then leap to attack President Trump and smear his supporters.
No accountability for shameless media
Could there be a more fitting expression of the media’s twisted priorities? This, here, is the problem: the media publishes libels and plain absurdities, only to later issue half-hearted retractions that come with no penalties:
“Regarding our al-Baghdadi obituary, the headline should never have read that way and we changed it quickly,” the Post said, by way of an explanation.
Where there’s no accountability, one can hardly expect reflection, or even the lower standard of self-awareness. But the Post may soon face Nick Sandmann, the “smirking” Catholic high school boy who was blackballed by the media in January, in court over defamation soon.
If the paper paid for its libels, it would be a first.
The Washington Post has been at the forefront of the media’s descent down the gutter of left-wing propaganda for years, but with President Trump in office, the paper is hastening its own decline. Democracy dies in darkness, indeed.
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