Wall Street Journal reporters really, really hate it when their bosses remind them that they actually work for Rupert Murdoch. Like yesterday, when their editorial board published a batsh*t crazy 600-word litany of election fraud charges from you know who as an extended letter to the editor. We haven't printed the link because it's behind a paywall. Via the Washington Post:
Trump took issue with an Oct. 24 piece from the Journal’s reliably conservative editorial board, which argued that the statewide margin between Trump and Biden was too vast for a debate over the status of approximately 10,000 mail-in ballots that arrived after the Election Day deadline to be germane to the outcome. “The country is lucky the election wasn’t closer,” the board wrote. “If the election had hung on a few thousand Pennsylvanians, the outcome might have been picked by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“Well actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out,” Trump retorted baselessly in his letter, before listing “a few examples of how determinative the voter fraud in Pennsylvania was.” Trump cited talking points from “Audit the Vote PA,” a little-known organization that has promoted unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, which he described as “highly respected.”
The Trump missive seemed to test the blurry boundaries that have long surrounded letters-to-the-editor columns, where newspapers have attempted to balance a commitment to showcasing a wide array of opinions with a reluctance to traffic in falsehoods.
It's not as if the WSJ editorial page had any reputation left to lose, since it's been contradicting its own fact-based reporting for years.
“Most newspapers don’t allow op-ed writers to just make up nonsense lies. Apparently the Wall Street Journal is not among them,” HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte wrote on Twitter. Jonathan Tamari, a national political reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, said Trump’s letter “is full of absolute lies — from the first bullet point down.” Amanda Carpenter, a conservative political commentator who previously worked for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), called it a “a garbage oped” and said the newspaper should take responsibility for the piece’s claims.
