They are purveyors of cognitive pollution

Well this is interesting but not unexpected. From New Details Ruin Khashoggi Hero Story by Brent Bozell and Tim Graham. It is needlessly polemical. The underlying facts speak for themselves.

On December 23, The Washington Post acknowledged a “problematic” arrangement between Khashoggi and the autocrats of Qatar, a nemesis of Saudi Arabia (and the owners of “independent” al-Jazeera). Of course, the Post buried these facts in paragraph 19, on page A-14, in a massive 5,000-word story.

It deserved to be the lede. Text messages between Khashoggi and Maggie Mitchell Salem, an executive at Qatar Foundation International and a former Clinton State Department official, showed she “at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government. Khashoggi also appears to have relied on a researcher and translator affiliated with the organization.”

[snip]

The Post claims they were not aware of this little non-independent arrangement.

In reality, Khashoggi wrote 19 pieces for the Post website from September 2017 to September 2018. They published him once in the actual newspaper before he died.

I have been puzzled by the effort to remake Kashoggi's reputation from the start. It seemed both heartless and opportunistic. Kashoggi was a Saudi journalist of fairly strong non-western views in terms of human rights and concept of law and governance. He played at the margin of serious dynastic squabbles, flirted with some terrorist interests, and skirted among various national interests.

None of which warrants what befell him. While wrong and gruesome, it was hardly out of the ordinary in a region which plays politics as a blood sport.

Consequently, it was a surprise to me that the mainstream media immediately beatified him. He was a marginal nobody in the American media and not much in the Middle East. Why this effort to make his tragic death more significant than it was?

Best I could come up with was that it was perhaps a meld of three impulses. Khashoggi was an occasional contributor to the Washington Post and so they took it personally is one thought. The second impulse comes from the fact that the US media is desperate in their decline for more relevance, authority and respect than they are being accorded by the public. A desparation which leads to such absurdities as The U.S. just became a dangerous place to be a journalist by Jason Rezaian. My response was Facts and numbers be damned - they can't get in the way of an hysterical claim

Journalists in many countries in the world are in danger; just not in America no matter how threatened they might feel by the President's merciless criticism of their failures.

I think the third impulse was a vague effort to try and tar their persecutor. Trump was close to the reforming faction of the House of Saud. If they can be shown to be barbarians, that feeds the perception of Trump as a barbarian.

Maybe it wasn't those three impulses. I don't know. It was just odd that all journalists should take the same party line on an event that was neither especially relevant to the US and of little significance in the region.

This new information makes it all that much more problematic. The Washington Post pays an occasional stringer who turns out be be a mouthpiece for one Middle Eastern repressive regime which is critical of another repressive regime and the Washington Post is unaware of that arrangement. How is this different from the purported Russian 2016 campaign. Yet another repressive regime trying to influence the American political conversation. Except in the Khashoggi case, the influence is not through some elaborate but minuscule effort to influence a range of fringe social media sites but rather a foreign regime getting the Washington Post itself to pay for that foreign regime's efforts to influence the American conversation.

It is bad enough they ran the pieces, it is worse that they didn't know they were being played. These are supposed to be critical thinking independent journalists attuned to fake news and fraudulent messaging. Instead they are purveyors of cognitive pollution.