A February 25 tweet from Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi:
Random thought: What’s the president’s relationship with his youngest son? He almost never speaks of him, is very irregularly photographed with him. A private matter, to a large extent, yes, but all modern presidents have played up their “family man” status. Not him.
President Trump’s youngest son, Barron, is 12-years-old, lives at the White House, and attends St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, about 12 miles north of the White House in Potomac, Maryland. St. Andrew’s is known for having a more nurturing environment than some of the top DC private schools such as Sidwell Friends, where the Obama children were educated. St. Andrew’s is a good school for kids with learning disabilities, the kind of kids who don’t need journalists probing into their lives.
Farhi’s media stories in the Washington Post, where he has worked for 30 years, have always seemed to reflect solid reporting and clear thinking. It’s on Twitter, where he has sent out more than 17,000 tweets, that he’s full of random thoughts—proving that writers do need editors, in Farhi’s case to tell him to stop. How can readers respect the writing of journalists who so often show off with such an aren’t-I just-the-smartest-and-coolest-person attitude.
In July 2017 I called Farhi “lame and disingenuous” after he tweeted about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his ownership of the Post so I asked a journalist friend, one who is very anti-Trump, what he thought of Farhi’s call for reporters to look more aggressively into Barron Trump’s life. His answer:
“Yes, this random thought seems needless, hurtful and needlessly harmful. And helpful to enemies of the press.”
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