Washington Post points to incoming editor’s links to ‘thief’, questionable record

Days after Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee’s exit from the newsroom, the publication has reported that its incoming executive editor Robert Winnett’s links to a “self-described thief” in connection with his reporting has “raised questions” about his “journalistic record”.  

The report said that actor John Ford “wrote in unpublished documents that he used subterfuge to assist Robert Winnett’s reporting. Ford has since sought to blow the whistle on what he sees as unethical media practices.”

This comes days after the New York Times reported that both Winnett and the newly-appointed Washington Post CEO William Lewis “used fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles”. The report cited their former colleague. 

“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,” the NYT report said, referring to the controversy involving right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid and its links to the alleged phone hacking from the mid-1990s until 2016. 

Former Washington Post executive editor Buzbee reportedly exited the newsroom after Lewis’s attempts to “kill stories” about his alleged involvement in the UK phone hacking scandal. He also allegedly offered an exclusive interview to an NPR reporter in December last year in exchange for not publishing a report on the scandal. Newslaundry reported the controversy. Read here. 

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