Taylor Lorenz Lost Trust at the Washington Post by Lying to Her Editors

Last week Taylor Lorenz suddenly announced she was leaving her gig at the Washington Post to launch her own site on Substack. As I pointed out at the time, Lorenz was already under investigation by the Post over something unhinged she posted on her Instagram.

Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post calls President Biden a “war criminal” 👀👀 pic.twitter.com/ih0xWPw049

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) August 14, 2024

She might have gotten away with the comment about Biden but when it was discovered she lied in public, to her editors and even apparently to people she knew. After deleting the image with the caption she reposted it publicly with the caption and claimed the caption had been added by someone else. She just lied about everything and she got caught. NPR had a story in August which seemed to be based on sources at the Post.

After the New York Post’s Jon Levine — a frequent critic of hers — revealed the Instagram photo caption yesterday in a tweet, Lorenz wrote back at him: “You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes.”

A fact-check appended to Levine’s tweet cited her apparent denial. (The contextual note to the tweet says, “Taylor Lorenz says this is a digital manipulation which has added a false caption.”) Lorenz told her editors that someone else had added the caption to the photo.

Lorenz has since told associates that a close friend took her posted picture and superimposed the caption upon it, as a joke, and that she shared it with the group on the private Instagram posting.

In a follow up story published today, NPR’s David Folkenflik reports that suggests the lying was probably the last straw.

Three people at the Post with knowledge of events tell NPR that Lorenz lost the trust of the newsroom’s leadership both by posting that selfie with the caption about Biden and then by willfully misleading editors in claiming that she had not done so…

After NPR verified the post was authentic, Lorenz changed her account of what happened, acknowledging to editors she had shared the image.

So she went from claiming she didn’t post it to admitting she did but claiming it was just a meme, not representative of her actual views. The just a meme defense seems to be based on the idea that she’s a real online native while her dumb editors are just old halfwits who don’t appreciate her meta-narrative genius. But even that lame excuse doesn’t seem to be true as she recently said in an interview she believes all presidents in her lifetime are war criminals. So she wrote it and also she believes it.

Lorenz engaged in a similar defense of her “war criminal” post on Instagram about Biden, insisting that it was an inside joke, not an ideological declaration. Others not as conversant with the ways of digital influencers did not comprehend the meme, she suggested.

On Wednesday, in an interview with the New Yorker about her new Substack publication, Lorenz said, “What I’ll say, on the record, is every single President that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime is a war criminal.”

The Post never did release the results of its investigation so there’s no proof Lorenz was given an ultimatum. I think she must have realized there was no coming back from this lie to her editors. Once she was found out, the writing on the wall. She made plans to move on before she had no choice in the matter.