WSJ prints Trump's lie-filled letter
The WSJ's Opinion section published a lengthy letter to the editor from Donald Trump on Wednesday that was full of debunked claims and conspiratorial falsehoods about the election he lost last year.
The Journal's opinion folks are separate from the newsroom and sometimes downright oppositional. Several reporters grumbled to me about the decision to publish the letter, but none were surprised, given the Opinion section's right-wing and contrarian bent.
"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 reporters said. "They should hold themselves to the same standards we do!"
Another WSJ reporter retweeted the Beast's Matt Fuller: "Newspapers don’t exist so that powerful people can publish whatever lies they want. In fact, that may be one of the very opposite reasons newspapers exist."
So what was the justification for publishing it? WaPo's Jeremy Barr inquired, but "Steve Severinghaus, a spokesman for the Journal, declined to comment about the decision to publish the letter. When asked specifically about the newspaper’s standards for publishing a letter, he did not respond."
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