One of the Washington Post’s longest tenured editors denounced the paper in stark terms on Wednesday night, declaring that it has “utterly lost its soul” after publishing an op-ed drawing false equivalence between pardons issued by Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
“The Washington Post editorial this morning essentially equating Biden’s questionable pardons with Trump’s outrageous Jan. 6 pardons was unconscionable,” David Maraniss, a 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner who has been with the paper nearly 50 years, wrote on Bluesky. “The newspaper I’ve been part of for 48 years has utterly lost its soul.”
Maraniss didn’t link to the editorial in question, but he appears to be referring to one actually published late Tuesday by Jason Willick, titled “The Biden-Trump pardons show collapsing executive restraint.”
Among its arguments, the op-ed says “it’s debatable which president’s abuse of the pardon power on Monday… was more damaging,” and describes them as “tit-for-tat escalations.”
While it does refer to Trump’s mass-pardons for Jan.6 insurrectionists “indefensible,” it largely treats Biden’s preemptive pardons of people Trump has threatened to persecute with state power as, effectively, morally equivalent.
Maraniss didn’t follow up on the comment, and as of this writing he has not announced he is resigning from the paper. But it’s not the first time he’s called out his employer in such direct terms. In October, after owner Jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, Maraniss wrote on Twitter, “Once again but this time more than ever I am embarrassed for my newspaper. The decision in this of all years to not endorse when democracy is on the line is contemptible.”