Washington Post: We Aren’t Biased!

Marty Baron, editor of the Washington Post, denies that his paper is out to get President Trump:

The editor of the Washington Post, which staffed up its White House team to cover the new administration, said the paper would have covered a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency with the same intensity as it has President Trump.

Cheered by journalists at a media roundtable in California late Tuesday, Marty Baron also said that despite some criticism, the Post is doing its job, not acting as the opposition.

“I just look at it as a new administration that we should be covering as aggressively, as energetically as possible. If Hillary Clinton were in the White House, we would be doing the very same thing,” he said at the Code Media conference.

That claim is easily tested. Did the Post treat Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton equally during the campaign? If not, there is zero reason to believe that the Post would have treated them equally in office. And anyone who pays attention to the Post knows that during the campaign, it was rabidly pro-Clinton and anti-Trump.

Take just one example, the Post’s editorial of September 8, 2016, which urged voters to disregard Hillary’s email scandal. The editorial concluded:

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

That same partisanship permeated the Post’s news coverage, as we noted many times.

The Washington Post is a Democratic Party newspaper. I have sometimes said that it is the most respectable voice of the Democratic Party, but a voice of the Democrats it surely is. For Marty Baron to assert that the Post’s treatment of Republican and Democratic presidents is the same is either delusional (if he really believes it) or deceptive (if, as is more likely, he knows it is a crock).

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