‘NOT A JOURNALIST’

Washington Post CEO Trashes NPR Reporter Over Quid Pro Quo Scoop

Will Lewis allegedly tried to get the reporter to “kill” a story about him.

Will Lewis, the publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, on Thursday dragged the reporter who alleged that Lewis tried to get him to drop a story about him. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reported that Lewis “repeatedly—and heatedly” offered to give Folkenflik “an exclusive interview about the Post’s future” as long as Folkenflik ditched a story about claims that Lewis helped to cover up criminal practices at Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids in the U.K. In a statement to the Post, Lewis called Folkenflik “an activist, not a journalist” and said he’d “had an off the record conversation” with Folkenflik before joining the Post “and some six months later he has dusted it down, and made up some excuse to make a story of a non-story.” Folkenflik said their off-the-record agreement was about the story he was reporting on the hacking case but not “his efforts to induce me to kill my story.” Replying to the “activist” charge, Folkenflik noted that the “Post itself and the New York Times do find my stories newsworthy.”