We have previously reported on how owner Jeff Bezos’ decision that The Washington Post not make any endorsement for President in 2024 cost the newspaper hundreds of thousand of subscriptions.
But now columnist Joe Concha of the New York Post says that Mr Bezos is doing what is necessary to save one of our nation’s newspapers of record:
Three cheers for Jeff Bezos, fighting to save The Washington Post from itself
By Joe Concha | Thursday, March 6, 2025 6:52 PM EST
Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs — but making his Washington Post staffers face reality may be his toughest-ever career challenge.
A long time ago in a media galaxy that now seems far, far away, the Post was one of the most respected newspapers in the country, capturing 68 Pulitzers in the process.
But in recent years, especially since Donald Trump’s first presidential run, the paper’s shift from left-of-center to hard-left extremism has become obvious and overt.
The paper has never endorsed a Republican presidential candidate in its history — boosting the likes of Jimmy Carter (twice!) and Joe Biden, along with White House losers Walter Mondale, John Kerry, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton.
And here and now in 2025, its editorial pages are littered with not just negative commentary on President Trump but outright vitriol.
I have said many times that I appreciate that Mr Bezos stepped up when the Graham family were in serious trouble, and the Post could have gone belly up. I’ve also said that, had I Mr Bezos’ money, I’d do the same thing, and save The Philadelphia Inquirer. but, as this site previously noted, Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong is just a middling billionaire, net worth a mere $5.98 billion, and he’s had to make serious cuts at The Los Angeles Times, which he had bought, because he’s just not quite a big enough billionaire.
The nastiness is clearly out of step with the national mood after Trump won the popular vote, swept every swing state, and turned 89% of counties more red than blue, while Republicans won back the Senate and maintained control of the House.
Becoming the MSNBC of print has not only hurt the paper’s credibility, but also its bottom line.
In 2024, the paper lost $100 million and about 250,000 subscribers in the midst of the most insane, unpredictable presidential election year of our lifetimes.
Perhaps it wasn’t so insane and unpredictable election. As Robert Stacy McCain pointed out, the polling firms in which so much trust has been placed have been getting things consistently wrong recently, and as campaign insider David Plouffe admitted, after the election, of course, Kamala Harris Emhoff’s internal campaign polling never had her ahead.
Bezos has apparently seen enough: Last week he announced that his opinion pages will mirror American values like “free markets and personal liberties” — hardly a controversial position at all.
But leftists — including many WaPo staffers — howled.
Mr Concha continues to tell readers about Mr Bezos’ moves, primarily about making news coverage fairer and giving the editorial pages a more diverse range of opinions, but the obvious question is: will such actual rescue the Post? At least to judge from the article comments sections, most of the commenters are just as liberal as the editorial staff, and the existing subscribers won’t be all that pleased, while more moderate and conservative potential subscribers have been quite happy, thank you very much, to get their news from sites for which they do not have to pay. Can Mr Bezos draw more dollars from conservatives?
Statistic Urban stated yesterday that The New York Times used to have about 1% of all newspaper employees in the country, it’s now up to 7%, and apparently still rising. It’s not that the Grey Lady has been adding a huge number of employees, but that smaller newspapers are dramatically shrinking, if not folding completely.
It’s a seemingly irreversible trend: why pay for news that’s available for free, which means that paid news staffs shrink, which means that newspapers have less news for people to buy. The Post was already losing money well before Mr Bezos decided that the newspaper would not endorse anyone; Mr Bezos, who had been mostly hands off, stepped in because the Post was losing so much money. Unlike Dr Soon-Shiong, he can handle the losses, but seems less willing to do so. I guess that’s the kind of thing that happens when you dump MacKenzie Scott for Lauren Sanchez!
Personally, I love newspapers. Not only do I need to read the news, due to my seriously degraded hearing, but I delivered newspapers as a teenager. But, in the end, print newspapers are simply 18th century technology. What about newspapers will really appeal to generations which grew up without them?
True diversity isn’t about skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation, but about welcoming differences of thought, of ideas, of debate.
LOL! That isn’t the kind of DEI the denizens of today’s newsrooms want to see. The New York Times editorial page editor was fired resigned because he allowed a sitting United States Senator to publish an OpEd suggesting that the rioters outraged by the death during arrest of a methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled previously convicted felon should be stopped by the military, and the Times’ #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading staffers ran off liberal Jewish writer Bari Weiss because, Heaven forfend! she supported Israel, a- few years before the October 7th attacks. The Philadelphia Inquirer fired Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski over a catchy headline that the wokesters hated, and their senior columnist was apoplectic that MSNBC’s Joe and Mika Scarborough went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the then-newly elected President of the United States.
Diversity of thought is simply not allowed in our big city newsrooms. Mr Bezos might try to change that at The Washington Post, and perhaps he’ll even succeed, even if fought all the way by many current staffers, but the paper still suffers from the basic flaw of all print newspapers: it isn’t free, and fewer and fewer people choose to give their hard-earned money to get information that’s available for free so many other places.
References
| ↑1 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
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I prefer reading to video or audio “podcasts”. I had a subscription to the local paper for decades…and now It’s been canceled for over a decade.
The only reason I stopped reading newspapers is because the leftist vitriol got so strident I just couldn’t take it any more.
The quality of the reporting declined horrifically as well. Every.single.article in which I knew something about the subject had major errors of fact or outright falsehoods. If I can’t trust them to give me accurate information and tell me the truth, what’s the point? I may as well just read fiction.
The point is, I’d be more than willing to pay for a subscription to a local paper if I trusted what they were printing and wasn’t being constantly propagandized. Unfortunately, Bezos hasn’t purchased our local paper yet and it’s still a leftist rag, unfit for even use as bird cage liner.
That’s what has caused the decline of the newspaper industry, much more than the rise of the internet or “free” news.
Of course, now that they’ve changed the paradigm, I doubt that it will ever change back. There simply aren’t enough old dinosaurs like me that would love to pay for a subscription to a QUALITY local paper demonstrating good journalistic standards. Most younger people are so used to getting their news from Twitter or podcasts, I doubt they’ll ever go back.
The newspaper industry has jumped off the building, but now, just before the sudden stop at the bottom, some are having second thoughts about their trajectory. Unfortunately, unless they grow wings, the best they’ll be able to do is frantically wave their arms and kick their legs for a time before they go “splat”.