The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal took different approaches in the last week to dealing with President Trump’s baseless claims about the election, underscoring the continued difficulty for news organizations.
The way in which the two legacy national newspapers handled the publication of statements from Trump and his team ignited a debate about Trump’s relevance in the political world, the responsibility of journalists to call out mistruths and the ethics behind transparency and fairness in the media business.
In the Post’s case, the outlet decided against publishing the full version of the former president’s response to an investigation it had conducted focusing on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capital.
The Post did not publish Trump’s full response because, it said, the lengthy rebuttal from a spokesperson for the former president contained “unrelated, inflammatory claims.”
“The Post provided Trump a list of 37 findings reported as part of its investigation. His spokesman Taylor Budowich provided a lengthy written response that included a series of unrelated, inflammatory claims that The Post is not publishing in full,” the newspaper said in an explanation of its decision.
The newspaper did not respond to an inquiry from The Hill seeking to learn more about the internal discussions that led to the withholding of Trump’s full statement.
The Journal days earlier published a letter to the editor from Trump verbatim that was riddled with inaccuracies, embellishments and false statements about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania.
One of the nation’s leading bastions of financial news and commentary for the political right was hit with sharp backlash for publishing Trump’s unchecked musings about the already-certified election’s result, some of which came from journalists inside its own newsroom.
“I think it’s very disappointing that our opinion section continues to publish misinformation that our news side works so hard to debunk,” one of the Journal’s reporters told CNN after Trump’s letter was published. “They should hold themselves to the same standards we do!”
In a response to Trump’s letter and the criticism it had faced internally for publishing it, the Journal said it “trust[s] our readers to make up their own minds about his statement.”
“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 wrote.
A spokesperson for the Journal said the outlet would not comment further on the internal deliberations that took place among newsroom leadership relative to Trump’s letter, but pointed out the outlet’s news and opinion sections are “completely separate.”
Such a differentiation can be a difficult line to straddle, experts say, as studies show media literacy and trust in journalists nationwide has taken a dip while alternative forms of news gathering and dissemination proliferate.
“When something is factually incorrect, you need to take greater care with what you are going to do with it,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I applaud the Post for being transparent in what they decided to do … I don’t know that we necessarily do enough of that in journalism, explaining to readers and viewers and listeners, explaining why we made the choices that we made.”
Matt Hall, who leads the Opinion Section of the San Diego Union-Tribune, suggested the Journal’s attempt to set its opinion content aside from its news content falls flat.
“Dereliction of duty by the Wall Street Journal opinion page, full stop,” Hall said. “We follow the same ethics, we’re held to the same standards [as the news side]. At the end, we just get to have an opinion about it. That doesn’t change that we need to publish accurate information.”
Rebecca Aguilar, the president of the Society for Professional Journalists, noted that in Trump’s specific case, where a high-profile public figure continuously has repeated debunked claims, it is incumbent on news organizations to “find the truth and repeat it as many times as we have to.”
“We also have to be careful that we as the press do not become indirect spokespeople for politicians who hide behind an op-ed to push their agenda,” Aguilar said. “We, as the press, have a responsibility to report the truth and let the public know when they are being lied to.”
The fact that Trump, who has been removed from mainstream social media platforms for making false or abusive statements, no longer possesses a direct means of communication to the American public complicates the role news organizations play in covering the former president and his future political aspirations.
A solid majority of Republicans have indicated in opinion polling that they would back Trump should he seek the party’s nomination for president again in 2024.
Trump has made it clear he may run for president again, creating a decision for traditional media companies, Facebook and other social media groups that removed Trump from their platforms after Jan. 6.
“This is one of the things that we’re going to have to grapple with as an industry,” Hall said, noting the recent election of Republican to the governor’s mansion in Virginia, a state President Biden won by 10 points, highlights “the divisions in this country that are only going to grow over the next year.”
“People are paying attention to us,” he said. “And the decisions we make matter.”