On Wednesday afternoon, what was long anticipated finally became reality: Darkness set in on democracy.
Or, at least, that’s how The Washington Post’s laughable slogan would frame it. After shedding readers and bleeding money for years, the capital’s putative newspaper of record announced it would be cutting a third of its workforce and eliminating entire sections of the paper.
According to NPR, while the sports and books section of the paper will be closed and the international desk reduced dramatically, the layoffs will hit every sector of the outlet’s workforce.
Executive editor Matt Murray said the move was “a strategic reset” in the AI era due to “difficult and even disappointing realities” and the fact that the paper wasn’t keeping up with the times.
“With the job cuts, the storied newspaper narrows the scope of its ambitions for the foreseeable future. It is a remarkable reversal for a vital pillar of American journalism that had looked to Bezos — one of the wealthiest people on Earth — as a champion and a financial savior,” NPR noted.
As with NPR and the financial cuts that it’s faced thanks to government cuts, the tale of woe spelled out in that paragraph is only about half true.
Bezos, of course, is still the paper’s financial savior, and the WaPo’s red ink is more or less a rounding error for him. However, he also views it as a business interest, not a charity — and either way, it would have to perform to be worth the money. It isn’t performing.
The main issue is that the “vital pillar of American journalism” part probably should be in the past tense, and the changes weren’t just long overdue, but long threatened if the paper’s notoriously woke staff didn’t start putting together a product people were willing to read and/or pay for.
…………What’s the why here? Liberals will point to the fact that Bezos hasn’t been willing to dump in the massive sums they want and corporate influence led the paper to not endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, leading to leftists performatively cancelling their subscriptions.
Bezos has still been willing to dump in scads of money, however, and part of the problem is that both the (NY) Times and The Wall Street Journal, not to mention various cable and internet outlets, have been able to foster the kind of connections with Washington lawmakers only the Post used to be privy to, while the Times has successfully pivoted to being a lifestyle magazine as well as a news source.
The Post still seems stuck in some sort of Woodward-and-Bernstein cosplay, meanwhile, only with a more stringent diversity mandate than in the “All the President’s Men” era.
Furthermore, the problems at the paper predated the decision not to endorse Kamala Harris, or even her replacing Joe Biden atop the ticket. In June of 2024, with the paper reportedly having lost $100 million the prior year, publisher Will Lewis announced via a conference call that executive editor Sally Buzbee had been summarily dismissed and Murray brought in for a turnaround.
During a call with staff in which numerous wokeistas complained about “four white men running three newsrooms” and whether “we need our brilliant social journalists and service journalists as embedded in our core product to make sure that people are actually reading the thing that’s out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post,” Lewis dropped what the kids like to call a Truth Bomb™ on them.
“We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore. So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best,” he said. “You haven’t done it … I’ve listened to the platitudes. Honestly, it’s just not happening.”
At the time, one staffer of the Post lamented “that Will Lewis keeps going to his network rather than plucking Washington Post leadership” and that Buzbee was “being replaced by more white men we don’t know.”
Well, now the old joke about the Washington Post’s headline if the world were about to end really has come true, if we were to believe this staffer’s vision about what was going to happen to their beloved paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness; Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.”
Jonathan Jones at Western Journal
When The Washington Post announced sweeping layoffs this week, those in charge at the dying legacy outlet briefly flirted with some honesty.
The paper acknowledged that its search traffic has been cut in half over a three-year period. Daily story output had also dropped. The brass even admitted that much of the garbage being put out was “for one slice of the audience,” as the BBC reported.
That should have been the end of the conversation.
……Alex Kirshner, a contributing writer for the leftist outlet Slate, responded to a post on these facts by Max Tani of Semafor with an absurd claim.
“There is not a serious market for ‘hard news’ for conservatives,” Kirshner wrote on X.
He added that editors know this, but would rather “scold their own employees for not doing an impossible job.”
……..There absolutely is a market for hard news among conservatives. There always has been. If you’re reading this now, that’s why.
What there is not a market for is paying to be lied to, sneered at, and treated like an enemy.
For most of America’s history, newspapers were edited for Americans. Plural. They landed on doorsteps and job sites. In the last century, many people read more than one paper a day.
………I bought my last physical newspaper somewhere around 2007.
There was a moment when it hit me that I was reading things written by people who hated me, and that I was funding it.
Meanwhile, better reporting was already migrating online.
The broader shift was not by accident. Newspapers became stale and rabidly ideological. The bias stopped hiding. Reporting during the Obama years shattered what little trust remained for millions of Americans.
That is when conservative media exploded.
……..Conservatives did not wake up one day itching for alternative media. We were pushed there after growing tired of being the target of a daily, coordinated assault on our values, our families, our faith, and our country.
So we tuned out, changed the dial, and stopped paying for the war on us.
Now, entire media ecosystems exist that make bloated newspaper staffs unnecessary. We can watch news unfold in real time on X. We can follow reporters directly on YouTube or Rumble.
We can choose writers who respect the truth and us.
…….Reality is crashing down on legacy media.
Peggy Noonan wrote, “I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.”
That day when we needed journalism the most came when covid hit in 2020. What we got were lies about ivermectin, lies about HCQ, lies about bats at wet markets, lies about cloth masks, lies about social distancing and lies about staying indoors and avoiding the sun.
America will not be the same if it loses the Washington Post and its storied reporting. Consider its coverage of Musk buying Twitter.
From November 18, 2022, “Musk summons engineers to Twitter HQ as millions await platform’s collapse.”
From December 19, 2022, “How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter … and how to save it!” By censoring tweets the Washington Post editorial board doesn’t like.
From July 25, 2023, “The demise of Twitter—er, ‘X’—proves capitalism is alive and well.”
Now we see capitalism is alive and working at the Washington Post.
As I said, America will not be the same without the Washington Post.
It will be better.
For the last 50 years, the legacy media has saturated its reporting and editorials with leftist views. The Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and the New York Post are among the few conservative counterpoints to the leftwing media conglomerate.
The WaPo has been a bastion of leftwing dogma for decades.
When readers’ minds differ from the liberals who run the newspaper and elect a candidate who is diametrically opposed to their ideology, they don’t respond well. They believe their readers are pretty stupid. Case in point: The New York Times ignored the Durham report on Hillary Clinton’s criminal conspiracy because the ‘spy scandal is too hard for our readers to understand’.
Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of The Slate had a crying jag during B. Hussein Obama’s regime because Americans were ‘ too stupid to appreciate THE ANOINTED ONE or understand the ‘complicated matters’ of the economy.
Instead of looking in the mirror and realizing their own bias and readers’ fatigue, they blame whitey and a litany of other woke complaints.
If the WaPo goes under, it will be a good day for journalism.
Related articles:
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2026/02/05/nolte-washington-post-suicide-five-acts/