Some people want to let sleeping dogs lie, but the Wall Street Journal prefers to let ex-presidents lie.
On Wednesday, the newspaper printed a letter to the editor from former President Donald Trump where he basically regurgitated all the demonstrably false claims he’s already made about the 2020 election.
The paper came under fire for letting Trump spread false information without any sort of fact check.
On Thursday, the paper’s editorial board defended the decision to print Trump’s letter without any kind of factual pushback by claiming that it trusts it readers “to make up their own minds about his statement.”
The editorial added, “And we think it’s news when an ex-President who may run in 2024 wrote what he did, even if (or perhaps especially if) his claims are bananas.”
The editorial board justified printing Trump’s election lies without clarification by claiming that “Mr. Trump is making these claims elsewhere, so we hardly did him a special favor by letting him respond to our editorial.”
Editors said that the paper offers “the same courtesy to others we criticize, even when they make allegations we think are false,” and decried attempts by the media to censor the former president by saying journalists should “examine their own standards after they fell so easily for false Russian collusion claims.”
But the Journal’s defense of its decision to not actually do journalism didn’t get much support on Twitter, based on the responses.
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