We have previously reported on Will Lewis, the newly-brought-in published of The Washington Post, and how The Philadelphia Inquirer’s capitalism and Donald Trump hating columnist, Will Bunch, went frothing-at-the-mouth angry about Mr Lewis pointing out that people just weren’t reading what the newspaper’s reporters and writers were producing.
On Fathers’ Day, The New York Times, the most credentialed of our credentialed news media, and the ones who retained reporter Ali Watkins after it was discovered that she had been fornicating one of her sources, told us what a horrible, horrible person Mr Lewis is.
Washington Post Publisher and Incoming Editor Are Said to Have Used Stolen Records in Britain
Years before becoming The Post’s publisher, Will Lewis assigned an article based on stolen phone records, a former reporter said.
By Justin Scheck and Jo Becker | Fathers’ Day, June 16, 2024 | 5:43 AM EDT
The publisher and the incoming editor of The Washington Post, when they worked as journalists in London two decades ago, used fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles, according to a former colleague, a published account of a private investigator and an analysis of newspaper archives.
Will Lewis, The Post’s publisher, assigned one of the articles in 2004 as business editor of The Sunday Times. Another was written by Robert Winnett, whom Mr. Lewis recently announced as The Post’s next executive editor.
The use of deception, hacking and fraud is at the heart of a long-running British newspaper scandal, one that toppled a major tabloid in 2010 and led to years of lawsuits by celebrities who said that reporters improperly obtained their personal documents and voice mail messages.
Mr. Lewis has maintained that his only involvement in the controversy was helping to root out problematic behavior after the fact, while working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
Can we tell the truth here? If the only way the Times or the Post could get evidence against Donald Trump was through “deception, hacking, and fraud”, they’d do it in a heartbeat. Both of those august journals swallowed, not just hook, line, and sinker, but half of the fishing pole as well, the Biden campaigns claims that the Hunter Biden laptop story was some form of Russian disinformation.
Good heavens, are we supposed to be shocked, shocked! that British tabloids used underhanded methods to get some of their stories?
The article is a long one, and with the exception of a paragraph telling us how The Wall Street Journal did very well journalistically while Mr Lewis was publisher there from 2014 to 2020, it’s a litany of actions the newspapers with which he was affiliated sometimes obtained otherwise unobtainable information.
But, can you guess what the Times did not claim? In no place in the story did the Grey Lady’s claims that Messrs Lewis and Winnett used not-suitable-for-drawing-room-conversation methods to get information, tell us that the stories published using such information were false.
Jeff Bezos brought in Mr Lewis as publisher because the Post was losing subscribers and money, $77 million last year. As the owner, Mr Bezos is trying to make the newspaper profitable, or at least break even; that’s what capitalist owners do. No one can know, in advance, if Mr Lewis will succeed in that, but at some point the newspaper has to either succeed, or go out of business.