Does the Washington Post have an Al Jazeera problem? One wonders, given its propensity to print one-sided and outright false stories that in the end require corrections.

It's happened so often the Washington Free Beacon decided to look into whom the WaPo was actually hiring.

According to the Washington Free Beacon:

At least six members of the Post’s foreign desk previously wrote for Al Jazeera, the Doha-based news outlet bankrolled in part by the government of Qatar, which is now sheltering Hamas’s top leaders, a Washington Free Beacon review found.

They include the paper’s Middle East editor, Jesse Mesner-Hage, who spent more than a decade as an editor at the outlet’s English edition, London correspondent Louisa Loveluck, investigative reporter Evan Hill, visual enterprise editor Reem Akkad, WaPo Live host Libby Casey, and breaking news reporter Adela Suliman.

The Al Jazeera-Washington Post pipeline raises ethical questions for an American newspaper that prides itself as a bulwark against threats to "democracy." Founded in 1996, Al Jazeera has been described by an Israeli court as an "intelligence and propaganda arm" for Hamas, and the outlet is banned from broadcasting in Israel, where officials alleged in February that Al Jazeera "journalist" Muhammed Wishah served as a commander in Hamas’s guided missile units. In the United States, the Justice Department ordered the network’s English language affiliate to register as a foreign agent of Qatar in 2020, though it has refused to do so.

The WaPo didn't bring it up, but one of its contributors from 2019, Abdallah Aljamal, who had since moved on to a media outlet funded by an NGO, had been holding Israeli hostages in his apartment until the Israeli Defense Forces freed them in a spectacular rescue. He's not now around to write about it.

Israel has actually banned Al Jazeera from its country based on its record of serving as a mouthpiece for Hamas, the Beacon continued.

"Al Jazeera remains a propaganda outlet that is often pro-Hamas and in the past it has been pro-Saddam Hussein, pro-insurgency, and pro-al Qaeda," Foundation for Defense of Democracy vice president of research Jonathan Schanzer said. "I think that when we look at the media landscape in the United States right now and the concerns that we have about the disinformation space, Al Jazeera features prominently."

The outlet falsely alleged in March that IDF soldiers raped patients and staff at a Gaza hospital. The piece was quietly removed a day later, according to the Jerusalem Post.

This is not to say that every last piece that Al Jazeera has ever run is propaganda journalism. I've seen good reports from them, better than what the mainstream press has had.

But newsrooms are infused with culture and that culture can come with reporters to new newsrooms. That so many of them are being hired at the Post even with all the obvious problems with the bias in their journalism is very problematic, given the politically charged atmosphere at that paper. And note that detail that one of these reporters left her Al Jazeera experience off from her Washington Post bio. Wonder why.

The Beacon's account gives so unusually bad instances of reportorial malfeasance that just happens to coincided with the kinds of things Hamas might like to see in one of America's papers of record. If it's the case that Al Jazeera's propaganda culture has infiltrated the Washington Post, then obviously it needs to be fixed. Hamas propaganda has no place in a U.S. newspaper. And with problems of bias, wokesterism and other things that slant the news, this is one more bag of snakes for readers to watch out for.

Image: Ron Cogswell, via Flickr // CC BY 2.0 DEED