Washington Post Throws Editorial Standards Out the Window, Begs Readers To Do Their Job for Them
Aside from CNN and The “failing” New York Times, The Washington Post is one of President Donald Trump’s biggest opponents in the “fake news” media that seem dedicated to dogging his presidency with incessant, highly critical reports on just about everything.
If the man takes a deep breath, he is summarily accused of stealing oxygen from American citizens in need. If he helped find a cure for cancer, he’d be criticized for putting oncologists out of work.
Trump routinely slams the Post for its incredibly overt display of bias and harshly antagonistic articles against him, and is engaged in something of a feud with the media outlet’s owner, billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
The “journalistic” war being waged by the Post against Trump, his administration and his associates just took on an entirely new level, though, as the paper appears to have outsourced its investigatory work to readers in the never-ending search for more ammunition to use against the president, according to The Daily Wire.
Rather than live up to the editorial standards and journalistic integrity they claim to hold sacrosanct, Post editors have instead asked readers to do the paper’s legwork and help identify the individuals that Trump has gone golfing with during his time in office, most likely so they can be publicly named and shamed for daring to cavort with the president or smeared along with him as somehow being suspect.
That’s right … apparently the most pressing issue facing our nation — for which The Washington Post is calling in additional support from the citizenry to effectively cover — is whom Trump spends his time with on the golf course.
As absurd as that may sound, the actual article in The Washington Post that begs for the aid of readers to help identify Trump’s golf partners is even more ridiculous, especially as it appears to be an earnest request made in all seriousness.
The Post reported that Trump has traveled to a golf course and presumably played a round on no less than 111 days of his presidency thus far — the overwhelming majority of which occurred on weekends — and even compiled a calendar of sorts that documented each trip. Each individual outing was marked with different colored icons to represent whether Trump’s golf partner(s) on those days were known, unknown, or suspected but unverified.
“On 81 of the 111 days, we think Trump has played golf as president, we have no idea who his partner might have been. Thanks to the White House pool, local news reports, social media posts and, most significantly, data compiled by TrumpGolfCount.com, we do know some of his partners,” wrote columnist Philip Bump.
Bump noted that most of the known golf partners were members of Trump’s clubs that he typically frequents — such as Trump International at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, or his clubs in Sterling, Virginia, and Bedminster, New Jersey — or professional golfers, foreign heads of state and high-ranking officials, members of Congress or members of his own administration.
Lamentably, in the view of Bump, most of Trump’s golf partners remain a “mystery” because the courses he plays on are private — meaning they’re not open to the general public and media. “What it means is that Trump holds three-hour-long meetings with unknown individuals multiple times a month,” Bump wrote.
To address this obvious crisis that could very well shake our nation to its core, the Post set up an interactive list of all of Trump’s golf outings — with his partners listed when known — and included a “Have a tip?” button on the unknown days that opens up a blank email for readers to fill in the gaps if they have an idea of who was golfing with the president on those certain days.
The Post closed out the ludicrous appeal for help from the general public by breathlessly citing a 2017 USA Today article that claimed that at least five administration appointees were members of clubs within the Trump Organization’s stable — GASP! — then proceeded to lay out utterly laughable speculation as thick as it could possibly be.
“Trump might have spent last weekend playing a round of golf with the person who could soon end up as deputy attorney general. He might have spent three hours on Saturday chatting with the head of a firm that will soon learn that it is exempt from certain tariffs. We simply don’t know,” Bump speculated. “Perhaps you do.”
With everything going on here at home in America and around the globe, with respect to economic and foreign policy issues, a once-valuable newspaper like The Washington Post has focused in on Trump’s unknown golfing partners as a serious issue worthy of calling in the cavalry to assist their reporting efforts.
Funny, but we don’t recall Post editors caring this much about how often or with whom former President Barack Obama played golf during his eight years in office.
Then again, that was The Washington Post’s days as the capital lapdog press. It didn’t turn into a partisan attack hound until Trump entered office.
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