A Washington Post opinion writer called a source for his own paper's newsroom a “traitor,” saying the person “ought to be prosecuted” for leaking confidential US military info to reporters.
Page A3From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
WaPo columnist calls his paper's Iran source a traitor; President threatens to report NBC's anchor to the FCC.
Two press stories, one week, and I want to take them in the order they happened because the order is the whole point. First, a columnist at a major paper, writing about his own paper's reporting on Iran, calls the source who spoke to his own colleagues a traitor and says the person ought to be prosecuted. That's a columnist's opinion. He's entitled to it. It ran in the paper. Nobody had to approve it beyond the normal editorial process, which, to be fair, is the process working exactly as designed — a paper printed an opinion some of its own reporters presumably disagreed with, and that's called having an opinion page. Then, separately, the President said he'd report an NBC anchor to the FCC over her handling of an interview, calling for what he described as a rebuke or punishment. Now, the President has every right to be unhappy with press coverage, every President has been, that's not new. What's slightly different is that one of these two complaints comes from a person who writes opinions for a living and has no power to compel anything, and the other comes from a person who appoints the commissioners at the agency he's threatening to send the complaint to. Did I just say the President appoints the people who'd hear his own complaint? I did, and I want to be careful here, because that's not a conflict of interest, that's just how the FCC is structured, it's always been structured that way, every President has had that option available and mostly not used it this specific way. The point I want to land on is that criticizing a journalist and formally threatening to route a complaint through a federal licensing agency you appoint the leadership of are not, structurally, the same act, even though the coverage this week has treated them as a matched set. One is speech. The other is speech backed by a regulator. I'll grant that distinction gets harder to explain the more clearly you say it out loud, so I'm going to stop here before I explain it any further.
“Same week, two different institutions decide the correct response to a story they don't like is to threaten the person who told it. One's a columnist calling for a prosecution, the other's the President calling the regulator. Different letterhead, same instinct.”
“The FCC letter is a routine fairness inquiry, we send those, this isn't unusual — did I say routine? We haven't sent one like this before, actually, but it's within the President's purview, which is what I meant to lead with.”
The receipts
Press can be criticized, but the president cannot use the power of the federal government as a threat against a journalist because the coverage is unfavorable.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.