Whenever establishment press reporters drop their masks of objectivity, de facto Democratic Party operatives or even hardened leftists almost invariably appear.
Tuesday, in the wake of Rex Tillerson's axing from the State Department, Washington Post congressional reporter Erica Werner dropped her guard, tweeting the following about the Trump administration's related personnel moves: "A Benghazi bomb-thrower will be SecState and a torture overseer will be CIA director — IF CONFIRMED BY THE SENATE." Who needs DNC fundraising letters with tweets like this?
Before social media, such leftist reveals usually didn't occur until journalists left beat reporting to start writing columns (e.g., Maureen Dowd at the New York Times), moved into progressive activism or Democratic presidential administrations (see "Revolving Door"), or retired (e.g., Walter "World Government" Cronkite).
Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, the mask sometimes drops much sooner. That's what happened with Werner:
The tweet appears as it does because Werner quickly deleted it. Too late, ma'am.
Werner's LinkedIn profile indicates that she joined the Post in November. But her tweet can hardly be laughed off as a rookie mistake, given that she spent almost 18 years with the Associated Press.
Werner's tweet clearly violated the Post's social media guidelines requiring its journalists to "refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything — including photographs or video — that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism." Excuse the pun, but calling someone a "bomb-thrower," especially in reference to an incident where four Americans died, blows any pretense of political fairness to bits. But apparently she just couldn't help herself.
Werner's Twitter rant isn't totally unexpected, given that her stint at AP featured several left-biased stories occasionally accompanied by a level of ignorance that was stunning for someone who has been covering Washington for 15 years:
- In July 2017, she co-authored a piece on how a Republican attempt to reform ObamaCare would permit "skimpy" insurance policies. Of course, the dispatch never mentioned that ObamaCare's one-size-fits all requires women in their 60s to be covered for pregnancy.
- Werner's co-authored June 2017 dispatch about James Hodgkinson, the leftist who shot Louisiana Congressman Steven Scalise and several others at a Northern Virginia baseball field, incompletely described a "piece of paper" the wannabe assassin carried, saying it only had "doodles and the names of three lawmakers" without identifying their party. When the AP dispatch was released, it was already known that his paper exclusively listed Republicans "known to be conservative members associated with the Freedom Caucus:"
- A year ago, she co-wrote a story which crowed about how the Republican Congress and Donald Trump had been "humiliated" in their attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare, and erroneously claimed that "Republican tax credits would have been based on age, not income like Obama’s." The fact is that Obamacare's tax credits are based on income and age.
Tuesday, John Hinderaker at Powerline stated the obvious about Werner: "I think we can assume she speaks for the Democratic Party."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
