I just reviewed the Washington Post’s dossier on Ethics Alarms. I encourage you to do it too: I must say, it’s remarkably thorough and damning, especially in the period before I switched my subscription to the New York Times, which was well before 2020. Some of the items that stand out: The Post dumping the role of ombudsman, because no one holding that position could possibly avoid exposing the paper’s metastasizing bias and incompetence; Glenn Kessler, the Post’s “Factchecker,” frequently ruling any statement contradicting his party’s talking points as a “lie;” the remarkable flip-flop of columnist Jen Rubin (and, to a lesser extent, George Will), whose Trump Derangement led her to adopt the exact reverse of many of the positions she had been airing before 2016; and the continued tradition of one-sided bias and infantile analysis from the paper’s political cartoonists.

Here are a few past essays about the Post as it rotted that I particularly enjoyed revisiting:

In 2017‘s The Washington Post, Pit Bulls, And How We Know It Is Foolish To Trust The News Media, I pointed out how sloppy and lazy the Post news report was regarding a local dog attack attributed to “pit bulls.”

In 2011, The Washington Post Flunks Integrity, Conflicts, and Trustworthiness, I wrote about…well, here’s the main portion of the article:

“Patrick B. Pexton, the Washington Posts’s ombudsman, had to write about the strange case of Jose Antonio Vargas, the celebrated journalist, once employed by the Post, who admitted last week that he was an illegal alien.  In particular, he had to write about 1) why a Post editor, Peter Perl, continued to employ Vargas and hid his immigration status for eight years after learning that he was in the country illegally and 2) why Vargas’s 4000 word piece about his deception (and the Post’s complicity in it) was killed by another Post editor, resulting in its being picked up and published by the New York Times. So the in-house ethics watchdog wrote about it, and concluded—nothing. 

Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli, who decided not to run Vargas’s story, ducked Pexton’s inquiries with a boilerplate “the paper doesn’t discuss internal news judgement”  response. “Fair enough,” Pexton writes. Fair enough? That is certainly not fair enough; no Post reporter would accept that kind of a non-answer answer from an elected official.

Thus the published report on the internal investigation by the Post’s independent journalism ethicist leaves us with these unavoidable conclusions, though Pexton does not have the boldness and honesty to state them clearly:

1. A Post journalist broke, and continued to break, U.S. immigration laws with the complicity of a Post editor.

2.What objectivity regarding illegal immigration issues and the immigration policy debate can the Post be trusted to maintain when its own management? None.

3. Rather than expose its own misconduct and dubious handling of the Vargas situation, the Post refused to publish the story.

4. If the Washington Post will not honestly and completely reveal facts that are embarrassing to its management, why should any reader trust the Post to report other facts, events and conduct that are detrimental to the Post management and staff’s own interests? No reader should.

5. Finally, if the Post management will not be candid with its own ombudsman about a series of ethics breaches, how serious is the Post about its integrity, objectivity and trustworthiness?

Not very.”

And THAT should tell you all you need to know about why the Washington Post got rid of the ombudsman position.

But this may be my favorite: 2010’s Journalistic Ethics Cluelessness: Weigel, Outrageous Bias, and the Washington Post. It’s signature significance. What kind of newspaper appoints a journalist (David Weigel) to write about “inside the conservative movement,” who, it turns out hates conservatives?

An unethical one. A partisan one. An untrustworthy one. Indeed, a newspaper like the Washington Post, a full decade before Peggy Noonan noticed that something was amiss. Weigel was exposed when his emails were revealed in which, I wrote, he showed that he was biased against the political Right not in “a possibly manageable ‘there are evident problems with the extremists in this movement and some of its underlying philosophy’ fashion, but in a ‘I hate these morons and wish they’d all die’ way, which is exactly the sentiment many of his messages convey.” Weigel apologized and resigned, but the Posts’s ombudsman tried to exonerate his bosses.

But there’s a lot of amusing stuff in the dossier. My favorite might be when the Post wrote, during the 2016 campaign when the paper was doing everything it could and lying its headlines off trying to get Hillary Clinton elected President, that Bill Clinton “allegedly” cheated on his wife.

Mourning the demise of the Washington Post in 2026 is like mourning the death of Dr. Jekyll after he had turned into Mr. Hyde permanently. The Post had become an “enemy of the people,” democracy, truth and public awareness. Those who are furious at Jeff Bezos merely reveal their own corruption.