Perhaps it has a low bar to clear, but The Scrapbook still believes that the Washington Post is one of the country’s better daily papers. However, the professionalism that once was a point of pride for high-profile news organizations is vanishing, and the Post is no exception. There were two notable instances recently that made us wonder if all of the experienced editors at the Post had been replaced by content-management drones. The first was a September 24 column by Fareed Zakaria, which begins with this paragraph:
Now, if Fareed Zakaria went to Christian schools for 13 years and came away thinking the “central message” of Christianity is “Be nice to the poor,” as opposed to salvation and forgiveness in Christ himself, well, either he wasn’t much of a student or his teachers were deficient. And thus having exposed his gaping theological ignorance, he goes on to use it as cudgel to excoriate American Christians for caring about abortion, marriage, and other social issues, condemnation that Zakaria justifies with this factually inaccurate howler: “The church’s positions on these matters were arrived at through interpretations of ‘natural law,’ which is not based on anything in the Bible.” Is there no one at the Post with any knowledge of Christianity, much less the inclination and discretion to save us from such claptrap?
And we’re afraid that the Post’s editorial performance wasn’t any better when it came to a discussion of economics. The Post recently published online an op-ed—“Tired of capitalism? There could be a better way”—on the concept of providing every American with a “universal basic income.” It was as stridently Marxist as the headline suggests, and as befits Marx, the prose had all the joie de vivre of a microwave instruction manual. How’s this for an attention-grabbing lead sentence? “Capitalism is a coercive economic system that creates persistent patterns of economic deprivation.”
No sane person would read any further, but since The Scrapbook gets paid for this, we persisted all the way to the piece’s stirring conclusion:
The word “freedom” has an actual meaning. It does not mean you are owed a life that is simultaneously free from being poor and free from having to answer to an employer. Even as an exercise in lefty economics, this is both wishful thinking and such an affront to logic we can’t believe it was published. If you think the fact capitalism rewards working for a living is “coercive,” we’d hate to see how this writer’s Fabergé egg of a belief system cracks to bits when someone tells him what the Gulag was.
It’s telling that one of the most recent features at the paper is a section of their website titled “Post-Everything.” We sincerely hope the paper abandons this new credo in favor of editing something.
