Media

Washington Post Stealth-Edits Story Describing Bari Weiss And Matt Taibbi As ‘Conservative’

Homepage of The Washington Post [Shutterstock Sharaf Maksumov]

[Shutterstock Sharaf Maksumov]

Brianna Lyman News and Commentary Writer
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The Washington Post stealth edited a story that described journalists Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi as “conservative journalists” as the duo release the so-called “Twitter Files.”

Taibbi and Weiss released batches of internal Twitter documents that have shown the steps the tech giant took to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, as well as deplatforming former President Donald Trump. Taibbi, who previously worked for Rolling Stone magazine, and Weiss, who edited for The New York Times, have both shared liberal and progressive views on a number of issues, however they have now come under fire for their Twitter reporting.

The Post labeled the two as “conservative journalists” for reporting on the “Twitter Files.”

“As head of trust and safety at Twitter, Roth was involved in many of the platform’s decisions about what posts to remove and what accounts to suspend,” WaPo wrote. “His communications with other Twitter officials have been posted in recent days as part of what Musk calls the Twitter Files, a series of tweets by conservative journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.”

The label immediately attracted a firestorm of criticism.

Walter Kirn, Taibbi’s co-host of “America This Week,” called The Post’s reporting “baldly inaccurate.”

“This is baldly inaccurate. @mtaibbi is not a conservative journalist, as anyone familiar with his work knows.”

Journalist Abigail Shrier echoed the statement, saying the term is used to “smear” individuals.

“It has no other meaning except to brand someone as unworthy. To signal to its readership that such a person can be safely ignored.”

Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis said the word is used to “signal to its NPC readers that Taibbi/Weiss are the evil out-group and therefore everything they say should be ignored.”

The Intercept investigative journalist Lee Fang said “there’s almost a medieval quality to a lot of political discourse. If you don’t agree with every mainstream liberal opinion, then you’re a conservative? They see the world in black and white.” (RELATED: Here’s How Corporate Media Covered The Most Recent Batch Of ‘Twitter Files’)

Fox News Digital reported that it reached out to The Post for comment and subsequently the word “conservative” was removed from the article without an editors note or correction.

The story does show it was “updated” at 10:57 p.m.

The “Twitter Files” revealed internal communications between Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, and the FBI, DHS and DNI as far back as 2020. Twitter also used a “vast array of tools” to limit Trump’s impact on the platform well before he was banned following the Jan. 6 riot.

The documents also showed executives made the decision to suppress the laptop story based on their “hacked materials” policy despite having no official ruling from law enforcement that the materials were hacked. Meanwhile in other instances the Democratic National Committee and Biden staff flagged several tweets about the laptop contents that they wanted removed.