Washington Post reporters seemingly celebrated President Donald Trump’s impeachment on Dec. 18, with one posting a picture of her and some colleagues with the caption, “Merry Impeachmas from the WaPo team!”
The photograph showed five Washington Post reporters smiling as they shared drinks and food at a restaurant.
Rachael Bade, a congressional reporter for the paper, declined to apologize for the picture. Instead, she deleted it and accused people of misinterpreting it.
“I’m deleting a tweeting tonight that is being misinterpreted by some as an endorsement of some kind. To be absolutely clear, we at the Post are merely glad we are getting a break for the holidays after a long 3 months. I will retweet the group photo w/ a better caption!” she wrote late Wednesday.
She had not shared the picture again as of Thursday morning.
I’m deleting a tweeting tonight that is being misinterpreted by some as an endorsement of some kind. To be absolutely clear, we at the Post are merely glad we are getting a break for the holidays after a long 3 months. I will retweet the group photo w/ a better caption !
— Rachael Bade (@rachaelmbade) December 19, 2019
The other employees of the paper in the picture did not comment on what happened.
Media workers from other outlets said that the picture and caption were a terrible portrayal of news agencies.
“This is a really, really bad look and it reflects negatively on all of us in the media. Really distasteful by the WaPo team here,” Bill Melugin of Fox Los Angeles wrote on Twitter. He told Bade: “What the hell were you thinking when you tweeted this? Some of us still care about ethics and unbiased reporting and this garbage makes it harder for all of us by reinforcing a stereotype.”
“Washington Post celebrating the impeachment of their biggest political opponent. An impeachment that they worked so hard to achieve over several years,” added Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist.
Washington Post celebrating the impeachment of their biggest political opponent. An impeachment that they worked so hard to achieve over several years. pic.twitter.com/IYVpzT2cCP
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) December 19, 2019
“Why do we do this to ourselves? Not a good look,” wrote David Martosko of the Daily Mail.
A spokesperson for the Washington Post told the Hill that Bade’s tweet was “ill-considered.” “The reporter who sent out this ill-considered tweet was celebrating being off the clock after a long day covering impeachment,” the spokesperson said. “She wasn’t celebrating impeachment.”
Bade and several other reporters penned a piece claiming to take readers “inside the decision to impeach Trump.”
The writers claimed that there was “an avalanche of damning facts and compelling testimony” that Republicans had “to confront” and cited anonymous sources to make several claims about Trump, including an allegation that the president “found it depressing” to walk by the portrait in the White House of former President Richard Nixon, who resigned rather than face an impeachment.
The witnesses brought in by House Democrats “kept generating headlines of damaging information for Trump,” the reporters wrote. They referenced U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland telling lawmakers “he delivered the quid pro quo message to Ukraine”—Sondland said he was “presuming” the allegations—and diplomat William Taylor’s account of a Ukraine meeting, which was rife with secondhand information.
