James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas caught two Washington Post employees — a national security correspondent and a product director — on hidden camera spilling the beans about the paper’s rabid anti-Trump coverage and how it’s good for business.
“It’s hard to get away from him [Trump], and people find it draining, but we think about that,” said Joey Marburger, director of product. “If Trump just disappeared tomorrow our traffic would drop by thirty percent. So yeah, we think about that.”
National security reporter Dan Lamothe admitted on tape that his bosses at the Post do not like President Trump. “They definitely don’t like Trump,” he said, but pointed out that the news section, while biased, at least attempts to give Trump credit when he does something right. The editorial section (which he called the “opinion from God — the Washington Post institutional voice”) is a whole ‘nother story.
“Those have become critical to the point where I’ll read some of them and I’m like, ‘Woo, like, I work for that place?’” Lamothe laughed.
Lamothe admitted that the Post spends too much time reporting negatively on the president, saying their Trump coverage “sucks all the oxygen out of the room.”
“There’s so much emphasis on what he said, what he tweeted,” he continued. “I can’t tell you how many times we get an email… ‘Did you see what he tweeted? What are we going to do about it?'”
The Post’s anti-Trump coverage doesn’t hold a candle to the New York Times’ or CNN’s anti-Trumpism, though, according to Lamothe.
“Some of the New York Times reporters are way over the top,” he said, adding, “CNN is always over the top. Wall Street Journal is very conservative on all that stuff. Some of it’s just like the—who’s in charge of your newspaper.”
As to that, Marburger credited Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos with creating the Post’s new motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Last spring Matt Drudge, editor and founder of the Drudge Report, accused Bezos of deliberately pushing reporters to write negative stories about Trump: “WASHPOST owner personally motivated in bloodsport after Trump threat of AMAZON monopoly breakup,” Drudge wrote on Twitter, referring to comments Trump made about Bezos during the 2016 campaign. “Follow the clicks!”
Marburger told the Project Veritas undercover reporter, “We narrowed it down and there were like three different taglines and Jeff was like, ‘You know what? I think we’re just going to go with “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” You know why? Because it’s dying in darkness right now.'”
“The Washington Post came to our headquarters this morning to try to turn the tables on us and kind of do what we do,” said O’Keefe.
The Post, perhaps to in an attempt to preempt O’Keefe’s sting videos, reported Monday that it caught a Project Veritas undercover investigator falsely claiming that Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore had impregnated her as a teenager while working with Project Veritas. The Post sent some reporters to O’Keefe’s office in New York to confront him.
Here are the videos from those confrontations.
A confrontation between the @washingtonpost and @JamesOKeefeIII. Full video: https://t.co/FszCr58eIf pic.twitter.com/vVwITaLWvZ
— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) November 27, 2017
Video reporter for @washingtonpost leaves after hearing about new #AmericanPravda investigation. Watch his reaction: pic.twitter.com/CCo3TRuvcC
— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) November 27, 2017
O’Keefe said “the major media has more of a problem with exposing the corruption than they do with the corruption itself. See, Washington Post, democracy does die in darkness. But it also dies in silence too.”
As usual, Project Veritas has more undercover videos lined up to embarrass the Post. As O’Keefe suggested to the Post’s investigative reporter Aaron Davis, one of his videos will deal with a WaPo reporter admitting that there’s no evidence of Trump colluding with the Russians.
“Stay tuned because there are more videos to come,” O’Keefe said.
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