On today’s edition of The Editors, Charlie, Audrey, and Dominic discuss the chaos at the Washington Post. Since 2020 — the year Joe Biden was elected, Audrey points out — the paper has been shedding revenue and readers. It had “a 50 percent drop in audience,” she says.
WaPo brought in new editors recently, to try injecting some life back into the paper, but this regime has met with pushback from staff, who are covering the change in a rather brutal manner. “This,” Audrey says, “is not the first time where the Washington Post has tried to eat its own.” She reminds listeners of how “we saw the character assassination of Dave Weigel for posting a joke on Twitter. And then . . . he was humiliated and then he was suspended, I think, without pay. And it was just emblematic of this . . . broader problem of . . . the Left kind of eating its own within the newsroom.”
Charlie, tongue in cheek, asks Dominic if the union will save the paper’s writers, and Dominic says he “thinks that’s the hope of some of the journalists who work there.” He refers to a one-day walk-out WaPo staff participated in last year and points out, “They put on of those inflatable rats outside the headquarters so it was really ‘edgy’ and ‘attention-grabbing.’ And everyone knows that is an effective way to make change in an organization, when you put an inflatable rat outside.
“I always think it’s astounding when you look at some of these layoffs where it’ll be like, yeah, they laid off, you know, 200 people and it was still only like 5 or 10 percent of their workforce. And it’s just like, my gosh, how many people work at the Washington Post? That’s unbelievable. How can there be that many people? Look, I’m not trying to compare [National Review] to the Washington Post. We’re doing different things. . . .
“But if we had 2,000 people working here, I have no idea what we would even do.”
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