I sent the following letter to each member of the Washington Post’s Editorial Board after the Post published a recent op‑ed based on the paper’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan. The letter addresses the Post’s hypocrisy using the slogan after publishing two hateful articles in 2018, “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” and Amber Heard’s op-ed that sparked Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against her.
Dear Washington Post Editorial Board Member,
I respectfully ask that, as a member of the Washington Post’s Editorial Board, you take the time to read this letter about the Post’s Democracy must not die in darkness editorial published earlier this month and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
The article was a moving tribute to the bravery of Nobel Peace Prize recipients Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, “… journalists of distinction and grit who faced off against repressive governments” and about the need for a free press to counter the world’s increasingly authoritarian regimes.
The editorial’s title, of course, comes from the Post’s Democracy Dies in Darkness slogan that first appeared in the Post in early 2017.
However, the Post’s use of the slogan is hypocritical and reveals a journalistic blindness in its use.
This blindness was unambiguously demonstrated by a repulsive article published by the Post in June 2018, Why Can’t We Hate Men? This #MeToo-inspired rant was written by the director of women’s studies at Northeastern University, who had the gall to openly and shamelessly express a Nazi-like hatred for men in a major American newspaper.
Particularly as a member of the Post’s editorial board, do you think that by printing an article that by its very name must be considered “hate speech”, the Post falls short of the true spirit of its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan?
Do you think that it was appropriate for the Post to have published it? Do you think, as some of the article’s more than 3,300 (vastly negative) commenters responded, “just change ‘men’ to ‘Jews’”, is a fair summarization of this hateful diatribe?
Do you think that the article echoes anything from the ugly history of Europe in the middle of the 20th century?
If you don’t see it, think about the term “the patriarchy” the author references and that is also mindlessly used by many Post columnists. Do you think that in the same way that the Nazi’s use of a “Jewish conspiracy” aided in perpetuating hate and violence against Europe’s Jews, the use of the term “the patriarchy” aids in perpetuating hate and violence against men?
If you think the comparison is exaggerated, then how do you reconcile Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American feminist published in the Post who, in a 2019 radio interview, called for the use of “justifiable violence” against men and imagines “… a scenario in which we kill a certain number of men every week” to “dismantle the patriarchy”? Or ultra-radical Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto – the Society for Cutting Up Men – who called for not only destruction of the patriarchy, but also the complete elimination of the male sex? These are not the only women calling for male genocide:
Christine Fair, associate professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service: “All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.” – 2019 tweet
Mary Daly, former Boston College feminism professor: “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. The world would be better off with dramatically fewer men.”
Sally Miller Gearhart, college feminism professor: “…the ratio of men to women must be radically reduced so that men approximate only ten percent of the total population.” – “The Future – If There is One – is Female”, 1982
#killallmen: this hateful hashtag might not literally call for male genocide; some claim it’s “humor”, but does anyone think that a #killallwomen would be considered funny?
Most recently, this journalistic blindness was on display for the entire world to see during Johnny Depp’s lawsuit over the Amber Heard op ed, published by the Post in December 2018, a mere six months after the “Why Can’t We Hate Men” article.
The Heard article shows that the Post has abandoned its journalistic integrity in favor of a biased “gender journalism” that allows gender partisan propaganda to be printed in the guise of “news” or “human interest stories”. (Normally, I try to use non-partisan references, but even partisan sources like The Federalist sometimes are undeniably correct in their assessments.)
After Depp’s overwhelming victory, instead of acknowledging the massive error it made in publishing the article, the Post only added a feeble editor’s note to the op-ed and then passed the responsibility to its media critic to “explain” the Post’s error.
Given the worldwide negative light on the Post’s decision to publish Heard’s article I would have thought that someone from the Post’s management team would have written something.
Especially with articles like this online:
“A publication with any semblance of ethics might have asked Depp for comment about the sexual violence claims before running with the allegations — then subsequently spiked the op-ed or sicced its reporters on the case for more fact-finding. But not The Washington Post.
“That paper, which loves to blather in its self-important tone about how “democracy dies in darkness,” didn’t bother to turn the lights in the direction of Heard’s claims. Instead, it gave her a free pass to air her dirty laundry against her ex-husband and consequently enabled her to paint herself both as a victim and a crusader of the Me Too era.”
Following the ACLU’s example, at the beginning of the Depp/Heard trial I ghost-wrote an “imagined rebuttal” to the Heard/ACLU article with Mr. Depp as the “author”. This rebuttal deconstructs the original article and, paragraph by paragraph, provides a more balanced and truthful assessment than provided by the horribly biased article published by the Post.
I implore you to read this rebuttal and give it due consideration. In case you decide not to read it, here are its major points:
- Feminists have threatened and committed actual violence against researchers and others who have told the truth about domestic violence: that women batter as much as men. This is feminism’s Big Lie. (For proof see The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project.)
- Feminists have lied about many other things, including the wage gap, or claiming that women don’t make false accusations (e.g., Duke and UVA rape cases) or commit sexual abuse.
- The Post has a provable history of feminist-inspired bias, thus helping feminists to propagate their many lies. (For example, the Post has almost universally portrayed domestic violence as “men battering women”, ignoring substantial evidence that women equally batter men and that mothers commit a large majority of child abuse.)
- On their website the ACLU says that its main purpose is to defend and preserve individual rights and liberties, but the organization spectacularly fails to meet this objective for one group of citizens: male college students.
- The federal government – including President Biden – through its acquiescence to the US Department of Education’s unlawful misuse of Title IX to handle sexual assault allegations at the nation’s colleges and universities, is complicit in violating the civil rights of male college students.
Were any of these truths conveyed in either the “Hating Men” or the Amber Heard / ACLU op-ed?
No, the Post has completely ignored easily proven facts like these for decades.
As a lifelong reader of the Post, I’ve always been proud of “my newspaper”, never more so when the Post, at great risk, in 1971 courageously published the Pentagon Papers and years later exposed a corrupt president with its legendary Watergate reporting.
But this pride has turned to shame over many years as I’ve noticed the Post has adopted an increasingly biased and extreme feminist-inspired view on issues of gender, most notably by its outrageously imbalanced, provably incorrect coverage of domestic violence.
This shame turned to quiet outrage in 2018 by the publication of the two above-mentioned articles that undeniably demonstrate the extreme gender biases of the newspaper. This is no longer the Washington Post of Katherine Graham, Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein. It’s been taken over by partisan ideologues, blind to the truth of their extreme positions.
For some time now, I’ve been writing letters to Post columnists (listed below) and emailing notices to Post management to try to get the paper to recognize its extreme gender biases.
I plead to each of you: Please take the time to digest the contents of this letter (including hyperlinks), to recognize these biases, to acknowledge them, and most importantly, to bring back a fair-minded balance to its coverage of gender issues.
Please bring the Washington Post back to sanity and respectability.
Sincerely,
Stephen Bond
Letter also sent individually to:
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS:
Ruth Marcus, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
Karen Tumulty, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
Jo-Ann Armao, Associate Editorial Page Editor
Jonathan Capehart, social and cultural issues Opinion columnist
Lee Hockstader, Editorial writer focusing on immigration, state and local politics, voting rights, Russia, and the Middle East
David E. Hoffman, Contributing editor
Charles Lane, Economic and fiscal policy editorial writer
Heather Long, Editorial writer and columnist focused on the economy
Stephen Stromberg, Editorial writer
Molly Roberts, Editorial writer covering technology and society
OTHER POST COLUMNISTS TO WHOM LETTERS HAVE BEEN SENT ABOUT THEIR OWN GENDER-BIASED COLUMNS:
Monica Hesse: as the Post’s gender columnist, when will you do the right thing and speak out against feminist lies and your paper’s one-sided gender bias?
Erik Wemple, wrote a column about the Amber Heard fiasco
Karla Miller, Work Advice Columnist: wrote two articles about the gender wage gap
Janay Kingsberry, Multiplatform editor for “The Lily” web site: wrote article about “dissatisfied U.S. women”
Kate Cohen, “Contributing columnist”: wrote two articles about college men
Julianne McShane, “Gender & Inequity journalist”: wrote two gender pay gap articles, female doctors underearning their male counterparts and a proposed NY city law requiring employers to include salary in job postings
Miriam Berger, “Reporter covering Middle East, Foreign Affairs”: wrote article Abuse Surging During The Pandemic
Candace Buckner, Sports reporter: wrote biased article on “Men Behaving Badly”