The media world flew into a similar outrage over the owner of the Los Angeles Times blocking his editorial board from issuing a presidential endorsement.
The Washington Post — newspaper of the federal clerisy, official organ of the Resistance, the place where “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — announced this afternoon that not only will it not be endorsing either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump for president in 2024, but that it will never make an endorsement again. (This is truly a shame; as a colleague lamented to me, now I guess we’ll just never know how these people really felt about 2024.)
The reactions across media have ranged from disgust to outright garment-rending peals of agony — resignations have already been filed — and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be laughing until tears roll down your cheeks at every last one of them. I’d be remiss if I didn’t share a few, if only to illustrate the absurdity of it all.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first, however: This was a business decision by Jeff Bezos. Publisher and CEO Will Lewis wrote the piece announcing the Post’s decision not to endorse (erm . . . “change its policy going forward,” that is), but all other reporting (including, hilariously, the Post’s own employees’ union) clearly indicates that this is a directive from on high, one that Lewis was willing to go along with. I think I know why — and it’s not the dull and obvious answer of “Bezos just worries about Trump regulators hurting Amazon” — but hold that thought for now.
Because before that we should note that Bezos wasn’t actually the first to act on this. Only yesterday, the media world flew into a similar outrage over the owner of the Los Angeles Times blocking his editorial board from issuing a presidential endorsement. The editorial page editor resigned after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong asked the board to — this is not a joke, dear readers — write a sober “pros and cons” analysis of each candidate instead. (I am deeply disappointed myself, because nobody should have been denied the comedy of reading the Times rate Donald Trump’s good qualities.)
The reactions to the Times kerfuffle were muted, because to be perfectly honest, nobody reads or cares about the Los Angeles Times. But the news from the Post was greeted with a collective gran mal seizure from online media lefties. There are simply too many denunciations from the cheap seats to mention here, but internally it was ugly: Editorial board member Robert Kagan announced his immediate resignation, while former editor Marty Baron tweeted “this is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty” (leading one to assume he wrote the Post’s current masthead slogan, among other things). Meanwhile, notoriously surly race-harridan Karen Attiah first fell into stunned silence on Twitter, tweeting only “Jesus Christ” and “Today has been an absolute stab in the back.”
Others from the elite world of media and Democratic politics piled on, and oftentimes they weren’t helping. Obama-era U.N. ambassador Susan Rice called on every other member of the Washington Post’s editorial department to “walk out,” which didn’t do anything at all to lessen the pressure on poor Jennifer Rubin, who in an ill-starred fit of high dudgeon was demanding just last night that the Los Angeles Times’ editorial staff writers all resign in solidarity with their editor to protest the non-endorsement of Kamala already discussed above. (Timing is everything, Jen.). Perhaps, as Charlie Cooke charitably sought to explain it, Rubin really only meant that other people should resign. As for myself, I’m still not convinced this isn’t a fiendishly clever move to trick all the right people into resigning — it beats pricey buyouts, after all.
In many ways, the reaction only proves why the Post was correct to make the decision it did. Believe me, it’s not about wanting to delude people into believing that the Post’s editorial board isn’t stocked top to bottom with azure-blue Democrats. It’s rather about the fact that the Post’s entire branding for the last eight years has been “resistance, resistance, resistance,” and not only has it led them to wade hip-deep into some of the most massively discrediting media disgraces over that span of time — the Russiagate hoax, suppressing news of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and their Covid-19 coverage being only the most memorable of them — it has utterly killed their business. The Post’s readership reached new heights during the Trump era, when it billed itself as the flagship vessel of “Resistance” narratives and commentators, but has been cratering all throughout the Biden era, to a point where it now has roughly half the audience it once did. This doesn’t sell anymore, even if you wholeheartedly believe that its activist turn has resulted in great and noble feats of muckraking defiance.
But the fact is that it hasn’t; the Post is threadbare and repetitive these days and hasn’t produced a quality of reporting and national journalism comparable to that of the New York Times or even the Wall Street Journal for several years now. The rot is internal, on a coverage level, not just an ideological one. That’s almost a secondary consideration — the economic bottom line is the primary one, particularly for an organization in as much financial distress as it is — but one that touches me personally. I grew up with the Post and loved it when it had the best sports section in the nation, a Style section I would read front to back, and an op-ed page full of interesting and divergent voices.
I’d like to see that Washington Post return. But it never will on its current trajectory, not until it shakes free from the madness of both openly embracing the crudest of activist politics and positions and also pretending to act as a sober-eyed tribune of the people. We will see if it can save itself.