The Washington Post is invoked across several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as a source of data, a foil for social media platforms, and a participant in the media environment surrounding Donald Trump. No episode treats the newspaper as its own subject; it appears instead as a recurring reference point in discussions of political ignorance, policing, censorship, and presidential communication.
As a data source on police shootings
In the episode on the alleged war on cops, Heather Mac Donald cited a database maintained by the Washington Post to rebut a claim she attributed to the head of the Congressional Black Caucus. She said the caucus head had stated in Congress that the vast majority of police shootings involve unarmed black men, which she called a complete lie. According to the database she cited, 990 people were shot and killed by police in 2015, the vast majority of them white and Hispanic and armed with a weapon and attacking the officer. Only 4% of those 990 shootings involved an unarmed black male, she said, adding that 4% is not the vast majority Is There a War on Cops? (2017).
Mac Donald also said a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer, a statistic she said would never be heard from the media or from the Obama administration Is There a War on Cops? (2017). In this episode the Post functions as an evidentiary authority whose numbers are used against a competing media narrative.
As a contrast to social media platforms
In the episode on censoring the censors, Frank Buckley used the Washington Post as a baseline for understanding what Facebook had become. He described the Post, which he said he gets in the mornings, as being like a lot of newspapers in that it is all about the horrors of Donald Trump, present in every part of the paper including the weather section and the sports news. That, he said, is the Post, and if he wants a different voice he can go to another platform or another site such as Reason Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019).
Buckley’s argument was that people used to think Facebook and Twitter were politically neutral, unlike the Post, which is an organization with a definite view that readers can filter out if they like. Once it seemed that some voices were being suppressed on those platforms, he said, people had to adjust their thinking: either Facebook is like the Washington Post, a private company that can do whatever it wants, or it is more like a public utility Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019). Bob Zadek framed the question by noting that he has countless ways to acquire information and asking whether bias at Facebook has any effect on political life in America.
Fact-checks as one side of a trade
In the episode with Casey Mulligan, the Washington Post appears as the fact-checking counterparty in what Mulligan described as a trade President Trump made with the press. Mulligan said Trump would consider how much to exaggerate a story so that the press would cover it, and he recounted a conversation about GDP numbers in which Trump asked his economic advisers what he needed to say so that the press would cover the numbers, asking whether he should say it was the best in 12 years, the best in 20, the best in 50, or the best ever You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020).
Mulligan said Trump also made claims such as being the best president for African Americans ever, or since Lincoln, and that there would then be a fact-check by the Washington Post saying he was not, perhaps suggesting Lyndon Johnson was better. That, Mulligan said, was the trade: the press got to call him a liar and give him Pinocchios, but it had to talk about the policies he had done for African Americans You’re Hired! Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House (2020). In the GDP case, Mulligan said, Trump ultimately did not exaggerate and told Dan Scavino to put the Council of Economic Advisers text exactly into the tweet.
As a marker of a liberal platform
In the episode on the Capitol riot, Nick Gillespie cited the Washington Post as the source for a characterization of Joe Biden’s agenda. He said that if Biden pushed his agenda, which the Post of all places said was the most liberal platform that any Democrat has ever run on, the Republicans would be back in power in 2022 or 2024 The Capitol Riot in Context (2021). The citation served Gillespie’s broader argument, drawing on the political scientist Morris Fiorina, that both parties have become so extreme that they produce unstable majorities and frequent flips in control of federal government.
A blog hosted at the paper
In the earliest of the excerpts, Ilya Somin told listeners they could follow his writing at the Volokh Conspiracy blog at the Washington Post website, spelling out Volokh as V-O-L-O-K-H and noting that Googling the blog or his name would lead to his writings and to his book, Democracy and Political Ignorance Ilya Somin on Democracy and Political Ignorance (2016). The reference is incidental to the episode’s argument, which concerned limiting and decentralizing government power so that people have more opportunities to make decisions by voting with their feet.
Across episodes
The Washington Post recurs across five episodes, but the excerpts show no development in how it is treated. In the 2016 episode it is a blog host; in 2017 a database of police shootings; in 2019 a newspaper with a definite anti-Trump view against which Facebook is measured; in 2020 a fact-checker whose Pinocchios are part of a trade; and in 2021 a source for the characterization of a Democratic platform. The speakers differ — Ilya Somin, Heather Mac Donald, Frank Buckley, Casey Mulligan, and Nick Gillespie — and each invokes the paper for a purpose internal to that episode’s argument rather than to examine the paper itself.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the Washington Post as an institution: they give no ownership, founding date, circulation, or editorial history, and no guest discusses its business model or reporting practices in detail. The paper’s internal operations, its relationship to other outlets, and the accuracy of the specific claims attributed to it are not examined. The excerpts also do not show any guest defending the Post against the characterizations offered by Buckley or Gillespie.