When The Washington Post doesn’t have facts, it resorts to innuendo

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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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This is why President Trump’s campaign of calling the credentialed media #FakeNews has worked so well: The Washington Post, lacking what all of the liberal organizations lack, actual proof that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh assaulted Christine Blasey decades ago, decided to go for innuendo:

In the ’80s, boys’ prep schools like Kavanaugh’s could be bastions of misogyny I went to an elite high school down the road from his. Here’s what I saw.

By Greg Jaffe¹ | September 20, 2018

This past week, I came home from work to find on my kitchen counter a 50th-birthday card from Landon School, the boys’ prep school I attended — which is just down the road, and not all that different, from Georgetown Prep, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s alma mater. On the front was a picture of a much younger me in a coat and tie, the dress code. Inside, six of my former instructors, all terrific teachers who have dedicated many decades to the school for mediocre pay, had written short greetings. It was a charming reminder of all that I liked about the place.

But the greeting landed one day after Christine Blasey Ford said in The Washington Post that Kavanaugh had drunkenly pinned her on her back and groped her when he was a high school junior. Ford had attended Holton-Arms, Landon’s sister school. I have no special knowledge about that night many decades ago — I never knew Ford or Kavanaugh, a man three years my senior who vehemently denies the allegation — but I do remember plenty about the culture of these same-sex programs, not all of it good. I began reaching out to old friends from Landon and Prep to see if they recalled the same misogynistic culture that I did.

All of the teachers who signed my 50th-birthday card were men. The few women who signed it all worked as administrators. This fact was no doubt a product of Landon’s culture in the 1980s: In my memory, we tested and terrorized the female teachers with petty acts of harassment, such as collectively staring at an eighth-grade earth science teacher’s breasts or dropping our pencils in unison at a specific time in the middle of her class (a feat we did not repeat for any male instructors). After several days of this behavior, the young science teacher broke down in tears. The reason I can recall only the names of my male teachers from that period is because the women usually didn’t stay long. (Today, Landon says that about one-third of its upper-school teachers are women, a big and welcome increase from my time at the school.)

There’s much more at the original, but you get the picture: Greg Jaffe is telling us, in some detail, that an all-boys tony prep school (2018-2019 school year tuition: $39,220 for grades 3-5, $42,110 grades 6-12) did not have 2018 feminist #MeToo cultural sensitivity some 3½ decades ago. Mr Jaffe’s prep school, which is “just down the road, and not all that different, from Georgetown Prep,” from which Mr Kavanaugh was graduated, and the writer — and, one presumes, the editors of the Post — expect the readers to infer that Mr Jaffe’s descriptions somehow constitute proof that Judge Kavanaugh’s alma mater was not one whit different.

I’m trying to picture Ben Bradlee having allowed the Post to print such drivel, but can’t.

But, Mr Jaffe and the editors did spot that weakness, and took an effort to tie the article more directly to Georgetown Prep:

A childhood friend, who asked not to be named, attended Georgetown Prep and remembered Kavanaugh as a decent and “very conservative” person. His memories of Prep were less rosy. He recalled the Friday morning announcements, usually delivered by a high school senior. “After the [football] game, there will be a mixer. Girls from Holy Cross, Holy Child and Visitation . . . will . . . be . . . available,” he remembered the announcer saying lasciviously. The joke, my friend said, was a part of daily life, accepted by teachers and students. “It was gross,” he said. “I remember nothing else from high school. But I remember that.”

Really? Mr Jaffe’s childhood friend can remember nothing else from high school? I am twelve years further removed from high school than Messrs Kavanaugh, Jaffe and the unnamed childhood friend, but I can still remember more than one thing from those days. I can remember football and phys ed, some teachers and students, different events in different classes, using the Bunsen burners in Chemistry and Physics labs, dissecting a frog in biology and discovering that the frog was pregnant, where my ‘home room’ was and small town life outside of high school. That Mr Jaffe’s ‘childhood friend’ can remember ‘nothing else from high school’ strikes me as improbable, at best.

But, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Mr Jaffe’s descriptions of the culture at his prep school are completely accurate for Georgetown Prep. Mr Jaffe and the editors imply further that such were the attitudes of the young Mr Kavanaugh individually. From this, we are expected to infer what, exactly? That the young Mr Kavanaugh was impressed that ‘Girls from Holy Cross, Holy Child and Visitation . . . will . . . be . . . available,’ and, further, that he somehow believed that he could take advantage of them as Dr Ford has alleged he did with her?

Of course, it’s more than just this story. Cleverly included in the story, in various places in the middle of the online version, were several other Post articles:

• Schools aren’t teaching enough about sexism. It’s the best way to end dating violence.
• In Brock Turner’s home town, we’re raising kids who are never told ‘no’
• Where do kids learn to undervalue women? From their parents.
• This is the kind of sexism women deal with in med school

At the end of the online article, I found:

• Read more from Outlook:
• Feminists treat men badly. It’s bad for feminism.
• Women’s friendships aren’t dysfunctional — they’re essential
• The two expat bros who terrorized women correspondents in Moscow

In every instance, every instance, the reader is treated to articles designed to drive his opinion one way, in opposition to Judge Kavanaigh’s nomination. Yet the editors of the Post, along with the glitterati of the rest of the credentialed media, are seemingly baffled² that so much of the public do not trust them, do not believe that they are anything but propaganda outlets for the left.

That reflects, I suppose, their bewilderment that Donald Trump received more than a handful of votes, that Mr Trump was able to keep Hillary Clinton a private citizen.

That is not journalism, at least not the kind of journalism that Washington’s purported ‘newspaper of record,’ with it’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” should practice. It is throwing shade, creating its own form of darkness, in a naked attempt to smear Judge Kavanaugh through innuendo, rather than to do something really radical like report the actual facts of the case.

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Cross-posted on The First Street Journal.
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¹ – Greg Jaffe is a national security reporter for The Washington Post, where he has been since March 2009. Previously, he covered the White House and the military for The Post.
² – There is a scene from the original Highlander movie in which the detectives are mocked by a sidewalk vendor reading the New York Post asking them, “What does ‘baffled’ mean?” There are times I believe that this ought to apply to much of the credentialed media.

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