The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos may have instituted free market reforms to the lefty newspaper’s opinion section, but its obsession with injecting climate change drivel into news coverage remains intact. This time, the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool algae nonstory is getting the eco-treatment.
Post climate reporter Sarah Kaplan released an idiotic take June 25 on the paint peeling and algae bloom currently plaguing the iconic pool, “Why Trump’s algae problem is much bigger than the Reflecting Pool.” It showed up in Friday's paper on the front of the Metro section.
She railed that Trump “has overlooked the real cause of unsightly — and often dangerous — algal blooms,” which given her history, had to be “pollution and climate change.” It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with vandals allegedly damaging the foam sealant by cutting one of the liners in the pool as the U.S. National Park Service suggested just a day after Kaplan’s piece went live, right? Talk about timing!
But what more can you expect from the same Kaplan that arbitrarily preached the intersectionality of climate change as being a “racial justice problem” in 2020? Apparently, anything on any given day could be a climate problem by Kaplan’s metrics, which of course she blames on humanity:
Meanwhile, rampant human development has increased the amount of fertilizer and sewage produced by farms and cities, and severe storms intensified by the warmer atmosphere are causing more of these pollutants to run off into local waterways — providing algae with the nutrients they need to grow.
What in the Paul Ehrlich is this nonsense?
Kaplan proceeded to tie her wild overarching hypothesis to the current Lincoln Memorial mess: “Algal blooms have long thrived in the Reflecting Pool, thanks to stagnant, shallow water enriched by pollution and warmed by sweltering D.C. summers.”
In Kaplan’s eco-centric worldview, Trump’s sin was that his $14 million “refurbishment” project “didn’t address the pollution that is the root cause of algal growth, said Hans Paerl, an aquatic ecologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.” This is all meaningless conjecture, of course, especially since the vandalism investigation has already seen suspects arrested and NPS Deputy Director Frank Lands confirming damage to the pool’s lining in a June 24 court filing. Scientists have even suggested that poor paint choices (dark blue paint) could have led to greater heat absorption to create the ideal conditions for algal blooms.
Not exactly a slam-dunk case of ManBearPig did it!
The media writ large have tried to embellish the pool algae into becoming the scandal of the century. NewsBusters Media Editor Bill D’Agostino just released a study showing that TV News networks spent a whopping seven hours of news coverage on the pool algae. Specifically, MRC analysts looked at all reflecting pool coverage on major left-wing cable (CNN and MS NOW) and broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) between June 14 and June 22, 2026. In just that nine-day period, the story received 411 minutes and 38 seconds of coverage, or an average of over 45 minutes per day. The Post, in a unique case, just tried to make the issue stick from a different, climate-obsessed angle.
Instead of covering any real news, the media thought it was more important to obsess over algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) June 23, 2026
This is why no one trusts the media anymore. pic.twitter.com/Ij8QctyVN6
Here’s a suggestion for Kaplan and the rest of the media talking heads: Stop trying to make the Lincoln Pool algae the next “Watergate” scandal. It’s not happening.
NewsBusters Media Editor Bill D'Agostino contributed to this report.
