Photo by Jon Tyson
In my story for FAIR last week, I criticized the reporting of Paul Schwartzman, and I’m afraid I’m doing so again today. Schwartzman is a solid reporter, and it can’t be easy being at the Washington Post these days… not with the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, taking a wrecking ball to the place to further ingratiate himself to President Trump (it’s working). Nevertheless, Schwartzman’s coverage of the forthcoming DC election warrants another look.
For FAIR, I looked at how Schwartzman went after lefty DC mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George for the sin of attending her DC Council colleague’s birthday picnic. The colleague, Trayon White Sr., faces federal bribery charges (a case I wrote about previously).
Meanwhile Schwartzman’s approach to covering the race for DC delegate, DC’s mostly nonvoting member of Congress, has been markedly different. In that race, Schwartzman lets candidate Brooke Pinto shape the narrative surrounding her partying with a figure far more toxic to DC voters than White — Donald Trump.
Pinto’s top opponent — fellow DC council member Robert White, who leads in the polls — has tried to highlight the Pinto family’s ties to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. But Schwartzman isn’t having it, instead relegating the issue to a “he said, she said” situation.
From Schwartzman’s May 26 story:
Where to begin? While Pinto may have “acknowledged… she and members of her clan have been to Trump’s club,” that’s only half the story.
It was only after I broke the story that Pinto and her family had partied at Mar-a-Lago that she acknowledged this, eventually.
Before publishing my 2020 story at CounterPunch, I emailed Pinto several questions about Mar-a-Lago — including how many times she’d been there, and whether her family were members of the club — but she replied only, “I am not a member of Mar-a-Lago nor am I friends with Donald Trump or his family.” Pinto, in other words, initially went out of her way not to acknowledge her or her family’s ties to Mar-a-Lago.
We still don’t know how frequently Pinto visited Trump’s club in the past, and whether her family were members there. Yet Schwartzman leaves Postreaders with the impression that Pinto has always been up front about her and her family’s ties to Mar-a-Lago, which isn’t the case.
Schwartzman described the above Instagram post, dated Dec. 31, 2015, as “a well-circulated photo of [Pinto] and relatives at Mar-a-Lago.” But I’m not aware of the Post ever publishing it, or even mentioning it before Schwartzman did last month. I first published the photo at CountePpunch in 2020.
In Schwartzman’s story, Pinto also gets to shape the narrative surrounding the above photo, which I first published at CounterPunch.
Schwartzman quotes from (but annoyingly doesn’t link to) a video Pinto recently posted on Twitter, in which she confirms that the photo is indeed of her and her family at Mar-a-Lago. But Pinto insists there’s nothing to see here, since the photo is ten years old and taken “before Donald Trump was ever president.”
Once again that’s only half the story. And Schwartzman can’t be bothered to tell the other half.
From my 2020 CounterPunch story:
Six months after Donald Trump kicked off his racist bid for the White House, Pinto and her family appear to have celebrated 2015-16 New Year’s Eve at Trump’s Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago…
To get to Trump’s black-tie event, which reportedly cost $1,000 per couple, the Pintos wouldn’t have had to travel far. Brooke’s parents have a multimillion dollar second home in Palm Beach, just four miles up the road from Mar-a-Lago.
At his New Year’s Eve bash, Trump, then the Republican presidential front-runner, glad-handed guests and in brief remarks pledged to “make America great again!” Then just before midnight, with his family and the Mar-a-Lago party as his backdrop, Trump touted his candidacy live on FOX News.
For over nine minutes (an eternity in TV time) Trump used his Mar-a-Lago New Year’s party — which Brooke Pinto attended — as his backdrop as he campaigned live on Fox News.
So, in the midst of Trump’s first bid for the White House, Brooke Pinto and her family attended a pricey party that personally enriched Trump, and doubled as a campaign event for the Republican front-runner.
For a candidate running for high office in deep blue DC, this doesn’t look good, and may even be disqualifying — at least if Schwartzman employed the same “party standard” he uses when covering Janeese Lewis George.
When the lefty mayoral candidate recently stopped by a much humbler affair — her DC Council colleague’s birthday picnic — it set off a wave of hysteria, with Schwartzman helping lead the charge.
The Post’s dramatic headline and subhead below seem designed to make Lewis George look suspicious: “[She] has found herself explaining her appearance at a birthday picnic for indicted council member Trayon White Sr.,” the Post writes, employing a passive voice that hides its own central role in demanding explanations from Lewis George — in ways the paper never has from Pinto.
Look at the picture atop Schwartzman’s story; Lewis George is nowhere to be found, just Trayon White (and a supporter). Two days earlier, the Posteditorial page did the same thing under a headlined that blared, “Janeese Lewis George’s ‘mentor.’”
White stands accused of corruption, and the suggestion from the Post is that Lewis George at the very least lacks good judgment because she attended White’s birthday and even said nice things about him. (For the record, there is not a whiff of corruption surrounding Lewis George.)
Of course, Schwartzman doesn’t apply this same standard to Pinto, who he insists has nothing to do with Trump, describing the Pinto family as “Democrats who don’t support the president.” Apparently paying thousands of dollars to party with a candidate mid-campaign, at an event carried live on national television, doesn’t qualify as support.
But Lewis George attending her colleague’s birthday picnic is somehow a scandal.
It just so happens that Pinto doesn’t want to tax the rich (like herself), while Lewis George does. For Schwartzman to stay employed at the billionaire-owned Post — which isn’t easy these days — this is probably the right approach to take.
