From Rationalwiki | You gotta spin it to win it Media |
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The Washington Post, depending on who you ask, is either commie trash, a neoconservative rag desperately trying to outflank the rival (and paleoconservative) Washington Times from the right, the epitome of the worst excesses of the liberal media, Jeff Bezos's mouthpiece with its weird fact checks[1][2][note 1][note 2] and billionaire apologia,[5] or America's Newspaper of Record.TM[note 3] Media Bias/Fact Check, a more neutral source, classifies The Washington Post as a left-center source, slightly on the left of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, for instance.[6] Since February 2017, a month after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the Post's new slogan is "Democracy Dies in Darkness" (although they claim it has nothing to do with Trump).[7]
It is most famous for the role played by two of its reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (made famous in the film All the President's Men), in slowly exposing the Watergate scandal that led to then-President Richard M. Nixon's resignation in hoping avoid the shame of imminent impeachment.[8] At the time, the Post was but one of three competing Washington, D.C. daily newspapers along with the Washington Star and the Washington Daily News. Their coverage of the Watergate scandal solidified the Post's dominance in the D.C. newspaper market and gained the paper national stature. They were bought by Jeff Bezos, the asshole founder of Amazon, in 2013.[9] At the time of the purchase, Bezos told his employees that he would keep a hands-off approach to journalism at the paper.[10] Consequently, they also can't afford you looking at the newspaper for free so they helpfully imposed an article limit before hitting the ever-obnoxious paywall as well as bitching about your adblocker and proclaiming they will use your cookies. But, hey, at least the 2020 COVID-19 coverage was free! To his credit, Bezos actually kept his word until 2024 at least, with The Post including negative reportage on Bezos' original billionaire-making site, Amazon and even negative reportage against Bezos himself.[11][12][13]
From 1961 to 2010 the Post published Newsweek, which was at the time, America's second-largest weekly newsmagazine. Newsweek then collapsed after WaPo sold it off (admittedly, it was going downhill before then).[14]
In 2004 the Post purchased Slate Magazine from Microsoft.[15]
In 1984, the Post's parent company purchased Kaplan, Inc., a tutoring and educational testing service. In 2000, the Post bought an online college and renamed it Kaplan College (now Kaplan University). Like most for-profit institutions of higher education, Kaplan U. has become known more for its quest for profit than for its quest for knowledge.[16]
An incomplete list;[17] some notable Post opinion columnists include:
Since 2016, you could be forgiven for thinking that at least some of these columnists are actually liberal because of their relentless attacks on the criminality and corruption of the Trump administration.
“”
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| —Eugene Meyer, March 5, 1935 (owner of The Post from 1933-1946)[41] |
Fred Ryan
was the publisher of The Post from 2014 to 2023. Following Bezos the unfortunate event that someone told Bezos that The Post lost $77 million in 2023,[42] Bezos decided to appoint William Lewis as the new publisher starting January 2, 2024.[43] For perspective on what a $77 million loss means to Bezos, his net worth in December 2023 was $171 billion,[44] and his net worth in October 2024 was $200 billion.[45] Bezos lost 1/2600th of his net worth on The Post in 2023, but his net worth still went up by $31 billion in 10 months. Clearly, if he wanted to, he could lose that amount of money on The Post from now to eternity if he thought it was a worthy endeavor.
Lewis' prior experience was as a journalist, followed by working as an editor for the conservative Daily Telegraph and the tabloid The Mail on Sunday,[46] followed by working as chief executive of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Dow Jones & Company, and publisher of The Wall Street Journal. He was tasked by Bezos to make The Post profitable again,[47] because every penny counts for billionaires. In June 2024, calls were made to investigate William Lewis' involvement in the criminal, dirty journalism News International phone hacking scandal.
[48] Also in June 2024, to solve the profitability problem, Lewis proposed a new undefined third division for The Post, "social media and service journalism", that would supplement the existing two divisions of news and opinions.[49] Lewis' June meeting with staff at the Post about the third division was not well received.[47] Given that "social media and service journalism" is undefined, and Lewis' prior experience working in a tabloid and working for Murdoch, one wonders if it's a code phrase for tabloidism.
In October 2024, 11 days before the final day of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, The Post announced that it would not endorse a presidential candidate.[50] According to The Post's employees union, the Washington Post Guild, the endorsement of Kamala Harris had already been written by the editorial board when Bezos ordered that it be quashed.[51]
In explaining the decision, publisher Lewis claimed that it was a return to The Post's history of non-endorsements of candidates.[52]
Karen Attiah wrote that the Lewis' claim that The Post had a history of non-endorsements was a false narrative, stating that in the times when The Post did not give an explicit endorsement, it laid out the facts about both candidates, making clear to the readerwhich one was better.[52] Attiah noted that even The Post's own 1977 book, The Editorial Page made it clear that the no-endorsement idea was wrong:[52][53]
“”I should begin by stating my dislike for the word ‘endorse;' it has an unqualified ring to it, as with Joe Namath, let us say, and pantyhose. It may have the effect of pinning a campaign button on a newspaper’s political reporters. … On the other hand, a compelling argument may be made that a newspaper ought to be willing to take a position on an issue on which every public-spirited citizen is expected to reach a conclusion.
|
| —Philip Geyelin, former Washington Post editor |
Additionally in 2016, The Post endorsed Hillary Clinton for President, stating:[54]
“”Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely unqualified as a presidential candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were the lesser of two evils, we might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that is how strongly we feel about Mr. Trump.
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In 2020, The Post endorsed Joe Biden for President, stating, calling Trump, "the worst president of modern times".[55] Since Trump has obviously and publicly only gotten worse since his 2021 U.S. coup attempt,[56][57][58] the timing of editorial neutrality is clearly misplaced.[59]
Historian Timothy Snyder accused the owners of The Post (Bezos) and the Los Angeles Times' (Patrick Soon-Shiong
), which also conspicuously did not endorse, of obeying Trump's tyranny in advance.[60] Not obeying tyranny in advance was one of the tactics that Snyder listed in his book On Tyranny (Resisting looming tyranny).[61][62] The anticipatory obedience of the billionaires is indicative of cowardice.[63] Former Post editor, Martin Baron, called the decision, "cowardice, with democracy as its casualty."[64]
A more substantive reason for Bezos' stopping the endorsement is that hours before that, executives of one of Bezos other companies, Blue Origin met with Trump.[65] Blue Origin is in competition with Elon Musk's SpaceX for dominance in private space travel; Musk has been campaigning and funding Trump's 2024 presidential run.[66]
Sixteen columnists' credit, opposed the no-endorsement order. Unsurprisingly, the 21 did not include any of the conservative columnists. The protesting columnists are:[67]
Also, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes created a dark, painted square, ironically titled, "Democracy Dies in Darkness", which is the slogan that Bezos came up with for the paper just after he bought it.[72]
Regarding the resulting subscription cancellations (which by November 1 was reported at more than 250,000 subscribers, around 10% of the paper's paid circulation)[73] and readers' calls for staff resignations, Milbank had this to say:[68]
“”But I can’t endorse the calls to cancel The Post. Boycotting the newspaper won’t hurt Bezos, whose fortune comes not from Post subscribers but from Amazon Prime members and Whole Foods shoppers. His ownership and subsidization of The Post is just pocket change to him. And if readers want to strike a blow for democracy, they’d achieve more by knocking on doors and making calls for Harris for the next eight days. But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me. We lost $77 million last year, which required a(nother) round of staff cuts through buyouts. The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be.
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In defending The Post, Milbank noted that since Bezos' purchase in 2013, The Post has won 18 Pulitzer Prizes for in-depth reporting on:[68]
“”They are compromised. Journalism is not about balancing the financial interests of your owner against your journalistic obligations.
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| —Jennifer Rubin[74] |
In December 2024, Bezos agreed to donate $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund,[75] what is effectively a slush fund or bribe.[76] On January 6, 2025, it was revealed that Bezos-owned Amazon Prime Video had already begun filming a hagiographic documentary of Trump's current wife, Melania.[77]
In early January 2025, Telnaes attempted to draw the emperor as he is, without clothes.
She showed a rough draft of an editorial cartoon to the editorial board. Rather than approving or suggesting changes, the board prevented it from publication. The cartoon depicted a gaggle of billionaire CEOs (Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times, Mickey Mouse as a stand-in for The Walt Disney Company, and Bezos) bowing-and-scraping before an enormously bloated president-elect Trump on a pedestal, just as they had done in real life. As a result of The Post's censorship, Telnaes resigned.[78] Billionaires are a thin-skinned lot, believing that they are self-made men who are smarter than everyone else. So rich, so powerful they are, yet they obeyed in advance to looming dictatorship.
On January 7, immediately following the resignation of several high-profile journalists, The Post laid off 100 non-journalist staffers.[79] Jennifer Rubin, a conservative opinion columnist who left the Republican party due to Trump,[80] resigned after 14-years at The Post on January 13 to form a new journalistic publication with Norm Eisen,
The Contrarian.[81] Explaining her resignation, Rubin stated:[82]
“”The Contrarian will be a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat. Our pre-election warnings that Donald Trump posed an unprecedented threat to our democracy were often treated as alarmist. However, the election of an openly authoritarian figure who traffics in conspiracies, lies, unconstitutional schemes and un-American notions, has moved the United States to an inflection point. The future of our democracy, and what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth” hangs in the balance. And yet corporate and billionaire media and too many in the political establishment persist in downplaying the threat and seeking to accommodate Trump and his radical agenda. We refuse to follow the herd.
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In February 2025, Bezos decided to clamp down on the entire editorial department, stating on Musk's fascist platform, X:
“”We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
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| —Jeff Bezos[83] |
This resulted in the immediate resignation of the lead opinion editor, David Shipley.[84] Former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron wrote in response to the new policy:
“”I have always been grateful for how he [Bezos] stood up for the Post and an independent press against Trump’s constant threats to his business interest. Now, I couldn’t be more sad and disgusted. … Bezos argues for personal liberties. But his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section
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| —Martin Baron[84] |
By posting on X, one may presume that it's the same brand of "personal liberties" as that of Musk's pro-fascist site, and by referring to "free markets", one may presume that its the form of laissez-faire anti-regulatory free markets that support monopolistic capitalism that favor billionaires such as Bezos and Musk.
In March, Ruth Marcus left The Post after a column she had written was killed because the article disagreed with Bezos decision for the editorial department.[85]
At first, Bezos seemed like the perfect owner for The Post, someone who supported democracy and journalists under threat, but was hands-off enough to not influence newspaper reporting. At one point in 2020, Bezos even paid his respects at the grave of Post writer Jamal Khashoggi who had been ordered executed by Mohammad bin Salman MBS) in 2018 in the Saudi embassy in Turkey.[86] As it turned out, though, Bezos was both a pinch-penny and a spendthrift. He was a spendthrift for ordering a mega-yacht to be built in the Netherlands that nearly couldn't get out of the harbor without the destruction and recreation of a historical bridge.[87] He was a pinch-penny because The Post has been losing lots of money for years, about $76 million in 2023, and $100 million in 2024 after subscribers and writers fled.[88] This sounds like a vast sum of money to mere mortals, but to put it in perspective, Bezos earned over $7.9 million per hour in 2024,[89] So, even in The Post's worst year for earning (under Bezos and Lewis' new leadership, no less), Bezos only lost 1/2-day of earnings on the venture.
To clarify Bezos' "free market" ideology, Bezos — via his company, Amazon — entered into business deal with MBS, Khashoggi's murderer, in 2025.[90]
“”It is worth being very attentive when oligarchs talk about free speech. The issue is not just that they are insincere or hypocritical. It is that they seek to traduce freedom of speech by making it seem senseless. Oligarchs pretend to be the victims, even when they own social media platforms or are presidents of countries. We are meant to conclude that freedom of speech is just the removal of any remaining impediments to the caprice of those who already control conversations. Debating the latest instance of oligarchical whining, we forget that the purpose of freedom of speech is to speak truth to power.
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| —Timothy Snyder[91]:191 |
“”It all started on Monday, when President Biden accused Donald Trump of having pledged not to accept the result if he loses in the fall and a reporter at the Washington Post described this as untrue, explaining that Trump “just hasn’t said that he would accept” and “previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.” The Post would find itself in the barrel again before the convention was over, as would PolitiFact, which was taken to task for, among other things, asserting that while Trump repeatedly tried to cut Medicare when he was president, he has said that he won’t next time (honest).
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| —Jon Allsop[3] |
“”Ironically, the Washington Post issued a fact check at the top of their own Tuesday fact check. They incorrectly said that the contents of Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were unknown. In reality, they now acknowledge, parts of the letters were published by their own associate editor Bob Woodward.
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| —Naomi LaChance[4] |
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