December 17, 2023

We get the largely unreadable Washington Post because my husband must have a hard-copy paper with a sports section to read with his morning coffee. To say its reporting stinks is to overpraise it. Still, Saturday morning I saw the first glimmer of actual reporting, relegated as it was, nevertheless, to the ever-lefty fluff of the Style Section: “News from the frontline of culture,” per the Post’s website. The article is not on the Post website, and I had to go to sfgate to find it available online.  It seems to me the Post has done what it could to bury it. Here’s why — it exposes the rot in journalism today.

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NBC News broke the news last week that more than 40 White House interns had sent an extraordinary letter to President Biden opposing the administration’s support of Israel’s military action in Gaza. So did HuffPost, when it reported Monday that 140 interns on Capitol Hill had sent an open letter protesting the war; it alleges that members of Congress have suppressed a wave of constituent support for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

The twin stories touched off a small wave of follow-up coverage, much of it portraying the purported letters as a rebuke to Biden and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Except the letters, and the news stories about them, left a few important questions unanswered — namely, who wrote them and whether the number of people reportedly supporting them actually did so.

In each case, it was impossible to identify or enumerate the letters’ purported signatories. The stories said supporters declined to make their names public. That left open claims that dozens of people stood behind the underlying sentiments. The letters are part of a trendlet of anonymous protest letters purportedly written by people connected to the administration and federal government. All of the letters were sent without the names of signatories.

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The New York Times, for example, reported last month that 500 political appointees and staff members representing 40 government agencies, including the Departments of State and Defense, expressed their opposition to Biden’s support for Israel.

Several days earlier, Foreign Policy magazine first reported that 370 employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development had signed a petition urging Biden to call for an immediate cease-fire (later news stories said the number of signatories at USAID had grown to 1,000).

In both cases, the letters were sent anonymously. The USAID letter explained that employees had withheld their names out of “concern for our personal safety and risk of potentially losing our jobs,” according to the Times.

He continues with other media citing these letters as signs of widespread dissent against Israel’s conduct, without a confirming source of a single signatory. He noticed the same thing that I and the Wall Street Journal did: that the petitions of the “White House interns” begins “we the undersigned” even though neither is signed. ”Isn’t it rich that the White House interns’ letter supporting Palestine opens with “We, the undersigned” — but was sent anonymously? How’s that for showing the courage of their convictions?”

The White House believes these letters seemingly written by the same person originated from an “outside source,” and note that before running with the story, NBC never sought a comment from the White House. There’s some reason to believe they were written by a doctor in San Francisco, “according to a database search.”

A few days ago, a group identifying itself as Administration insiders held a vigil outside the White House calling for a cease-fire. Once again, they might be anyone, as they hid their identities.