The Washington Post Is Taking a Dive

In his most recent piece documenting the slow and steady rise of the right-wing media Wurlitzer and its impact on the 2024 election, TNR editor Michael Tomasky made a dire prediction. “I predict Sinclair or the News Corp. will own The Washington Post one day,” he warned. “Maybe sooner than we think.” It’s a sad thing to say about the hometown newspaper that gave me my first job (I was 13 and was a paperboy), but the paper has the stench of a distressed asset these days. In the tumultuous period that followed the paper’s decision to spike its endorsement of Kamala Harris, it lost 250,000 subscribers—10 percent of its readership.

Suffice it to say, I hardly think the paper’s decision impacted the election. I have long been of the opinion that newspaper endorsements mostly serve the purpose of making an outlet’s stodgiest eminences feel like their opinions are consequential, when in reality they don’t at all move the needle with voters. Which makes it all the more bizarre that Jeff Bezos didn’t just let his editors’ wholly inessential natterings on the presidential election see the light of day, where they would have sparked an hour or two of conversation among a vanishingly small number of people, then faded like the evening sun.

Bezos instead went for Option B: melodramatically vomit down your shirtfront in full view of everyone, anger subscribers for no good reason, and touch off a wave of resignations. This says a lot about Bezos’s reign at the paper, which we can call a comprehensive failure. (The only successful way for a plutocrat to own a newspaper is for the Richie Rich in question to follow my two-step plan: Shut your mouth, and write those checks.) The only question now is what’s next: Is the paper going full Trump, or will it merely end up in the same place as so many of the platforms built by Bezos’s benighted generation of tech moguls (including Amazon)—a state of permanently enshittified disrepair.

Bezos had been in charge of the paper for three years before Trump’s election kicked off a sugar-rush period for newspaper subscribers, who flocked to the biggest brands in the belief that they’d play something of a vital role in heading off what looked to be a historically corrupt presidency with timely accountability journalism. The Post was there to capture the moment, rebranding itself with its “Democracy dies in darkness” motto. Having lured so many to its tender embraces with the promise of a more crusading form of truth telling, when the paper made its poorly timed decision last month to spike the endorsement, it was destined to land with a loud splat—and a sense of treachery. As TNR contributor Parker Molloy wrote, “This move didn’t come across as a principled stand for neutrality; it felt like capitulation, a betrayal of trust.”

Bezos then compounded the original error by trying to explain it, in terms that suggested that he needed to wreck his paper’s credibility with subscribers in order to save the journalism industry. “Our profession,” Bezos declaimed, “is now the least trusted of all.” It’s a pretty remarkable thing for a person who bulldozed his way into that profession 11 years ago, and who hitherto had, ostensibly, a very strong hand in guiding one of the industry’s biggest brands, to say about how things had fared under his watch. Every accusation is a confession, as they say.

But this was the central mystery of Bezos’s “how things work” explainer: whether and how he was there, in the rooms where the paper’s leaders met, at all. His presence in these great affairs was by his own account phantasmal; his fingerprints on decisions, according to his recollections, impossible to trace. His noncorporeal approach to running the paper didn’t say much about whether some virtue could be assigned to the spiking of the endorsement. But it did offer a window into his management style. “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it,” Bezos wrote. “That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.” Who is the “we,” here? Who was ultimately in charge of these decisions? What guided the paper to this public endorsement fiasco?

Bezos had an incomplete answer to the last question, at least. “I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” he wrote. This was implicitly a rebuttal of reports that, in The Guardian’s words, “executives from his aerospace company met with Donald Trump on the same day the newspaper prevented its editorial team from publishing an endorsement of his opponent in the US presidential election.” Taken as a whole, it makes you wonder which of his companies Bezos is actually in charge of, to be so conveniently at a remove from the comings and goings of the people under his employ.

Bezos’s explanation arrived too late and too stupid to stem the tide of subscribers stampeding toward the exits. You can hardly blame a constituency nurtured on the Post’s flamboyant Trump-era marketing for deciding to bolt once management staged its endorsement rug-pull. As Brian Beutler remarked in his Off Message newsletter, “That’s quite obviously not what pro-democracy Americans signed up for.” The whole sordid mess left the paper’s top brass with what Beutler termed “a wake-up call … that the country’s anti-Trump majority is still a force to be reckoned with.”

But it would appear that the wake-up call went unheeded, for the next move undertaken by the paper’s editorial board hardly recognized their subscribers as this “force to be reckoned with” but rather characterized them as pests that needed to be brought to heel. As the paper’s editorial board wrote in their election postmortem:

Those understandably worried about another Trump term need also to keep an open mind regarding the reasons it is occurring and how, in fact, Mr. Trump broadened his support, forging a diverse coalition. It won’t do to dismiss a majority of the country as biased, ignorant or otherwise basely motivated. Yes, prejudices against foreigners, people of color and other targets of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric surely play a part in his extraordinarily durable appeal, but they can’t explain it all; indeed, the condescension of elites is itself a factor against which his voters were protesting by supporting him.

Leaving aside the matter of whether Trump truly did broaden his support, this is a galling rebuke of the Post’s own readership, to say nothing of liberal Americans everywhere. The edit board makes it sound as if dismissing “a majority of the country as biased, ignorant or otherwise basely motivated” is some big political no-no. But this kind of broad dismissal is precisely what Trumpism is, and Trumpism—last time I checked—seems to be doing rather well!

Here the paper’s top brass has speed-run to the very place where one has to assume that Bezos wants them to go: It’s OK for one political movement to be broadly alienating toward a wide swath of the country and impose retributive policies upon them, while the out-group disfavored by these vengeful political actors have no recourse but to participate in mandatory empathy sessions with the people who are out for revenge.

Obviously, the editors of The Washington Post are entitled to their opinion, but one must ask: What then, is the proposition for subscribers here? The Trump era has been replete with endless efforts to plumb the depths of Trump voters, to discover their motivations, sand off their edges, humanize them in the face of those who might judge them harshly. There’s been no concomitant effort to reach out to liberal voters, even after they won an election in 2020. But electoral victories shouldn’t be the issue that decides whether people have value or not. Liberals have just as much right to be met on the high road as anyone else. And they should perhaps think twice about supporting an institution that insists otherwise.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.