Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Defends Printing Trump Election Lies: ‘We Trust Our Readers to Make Up Their Own Minds’
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board defended giving former President Donald Trump space to continue pushing election lies.
The editorial board recently made an aside in a piece about 2020 saying President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania fair and square. This so enraged Trump he penned an angry letter falsely repeating his rigged election talk. The Journal ran the letter unannotated Wednesday, and thus the paper received serious criticism for giving Trump that platform.
After a day of criticism, the editorial board finally responded Thursday afternoon, starting with a mocking declaration that “the progressive parsons of the press are aflutter that we published a letter to the editor Thursday from former President Trump.”
“We trust our readers to make up their own minds about his statement. 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,” they argue.
They fact-check some of the false claims Trump made, including a truly baffling one apparently sourced from something Lindsey Graham said on TV last November.
Some of Mr. Trump’s figures appear to come from amateur spelunking into voter data. Caveat emptor when this is done by motivated partisans unfamiliar with election systems. The “audit” team in Arizona asserted that Maricopa County received 74,000 more mail votes than were sent out. This was debunked as a misunderstanding of the files.
The justification for printing Trump’s election lies is that “Mr. Trump is making these claims elsewhere, so we hardly did him a special favor by letting him respond to our editorial.”
“We offer the same courtesy to others we criticize, even when they make allegations we think are false.”
The editorial board also decries media “attempts to censor Mr. Trump” and said they should “examine their own standards after they fell so easily for false Russian collusion claims.”
New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman said on CNN Thursday morning that Trump’s claims are ones that Journal reporters had already fact-checked, but “here they are just being run in a way that if an average reader wrote in, they couldn’t get this stuff in, most likely.”
