Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough!

When it comes to posts on Twitter, I have gotten away from doing the easy thing and embedding them to taking screenshots and then embedding the links to them. I use them for illustrations on my site, because tweets are not copyrighted, and because they serve as a permanent record.

Well, apparently Bethany Allen, whose Twitter bio states that she is “Head of China investigations @aspi_cts. Was @axios, @foreignpolicy, @yale, @HopkinsNanjing. Author BEIJING RULES, FT Best Books 2023. bethanyallen AT aspi org au” isn’t quite as intelligent and educated as she thinks she is, because Stephen Miller did the same thing, and took a screenshot of his response to her now deleted tweet.

This site has made considerable fun of CNN’s Jake Tapper and his co-author Alex Thompson for their non mea culpa est book, Original Sin: President Bidenā€™s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, and now we’re seeing supposedly professional journolists[1]The spelling ā€˜journolistā€™ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading trying to tell us that it’s not their fault that they didn’t report on the perv from the Pyrite State, Rep. Eric Swalwell and his proclivity for sexual assault. No, they knew about it, but it wasn’t their beat, you know?

Steven Tavares of the East Bay Insider admitted that he knew about it as well, since 2013, screenshot here, and also kept his mouth shut.

Well, Mr Tavares is stuck in the area around the city of my birth — Go Oakland, never Las Vegas, Raiders! — and Miss Allen lives in Taipei, far, far away from the corridors of federal power in Washington, DC, and even they had heard about what has been described as an ‘open secret’ concerning Mr Swalwell. So how is it that The New York Times — “All the News That’s Fit to Print” — and The Washington Post — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — found news about the Distinguished Gentleman from California not fit to print, found it too dark to illuminate for democracy? Do the voters of California’s 14th congressional district not deserve to know this about their representative in Congress? Do the voters in the United States, frequently subjected to Mr Swalwell’s attacks on President Trump, and his attempts to derail the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, not deserve to know what a huge hypocrite was making those allegations?

We have previously noted the losses and layoffs at the Post, but stories about Mr Swalwell’s proclivities had been circulating long before those layoffs, and still the Post never reported on it. There were plenty of stories, including the Post’s Taylor Lorenz’s doxxing of Chaya Raichik, an attempt to expose the previously anonymous producer of the Twitter site Libs of TikTok, hoping to get Miss Raichik to lose her day job or get run out of town, or something else horrible to happen to her, Miss Raichik having done nothing more than to have exposed the idiocy of the #woke[2]From Wikipedia: WokeĀ (/ĖˆwoŹŠk/) as a political term ofĀ African-AmericanĀ origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerningĀ social justiceĀ andĀ racial justice.Ā It is derived from … Continue reading, but expose an actual predator in Congress? Maybe if he’d been a Republican, yeah, but a prominent Democrat? Nope, not happening.

But let’s tell the full truth here: former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy knew, which means most if not all Republicans in the House of Representatives knew as well, and they didn’t expose Mr Swalwell either. Either they were just fine with the pervert from the Pyrite State’s continued attacks on President Trump, or they didn’t want the light of truth shone on themselves, and both possibilities could be true.

Jeff Bezos, you’ve got some work to do! You want to revive The Washington Post, to get it back to where it was? Get your reporters on the case, get them to document and expose all of the members of Congress who are abusing their power and positions! No one will ever believe that your reporters haven’t heard the rumors about Mr Swalwell, and that there aren’t other possible abusers out there.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ā€˜journolistā€™ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

WokeĀ (/ĖˆwoŹŠk/) as a political term ofĀ African-AmericanĀ origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerningĀ social justiceĀ andĀ racial justice.Ā It is derived from theĀ African-American Vernacular EnglishĀ expression ā€œstay wokeā€œ, whoseĀ grammatical aspectĀ refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s,Ā wokeĀ had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the termsĀ woke cultureĀ andĀ woke politicsĀ also being used). It has been the subject ofĀ memesĀ and ironic usage.Ā Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of theĀ Black Lives MatterĀ movement.

I shall confess to sometimes ā€œironic usageā€ of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ā€˜wokeā€™ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Has The Philadelphia Inquirer changed its policies on publishing photos of accused sex offenders?

We noted, on April Fool’s Day, something which wasn’t foolish, that The Philadelphia Inquirer, which has a stated policy of not publishing mug shots chose to publish the photo of a woman charged with, but not yet convicted of, grooming a student for sex, something which allegedly began when the boy was only twelve.

Now we have this story:

Montco teacher who tried to coerce a teenage student to kiss him sent to county jail

John Richards IV told the 13-year-old she was beautiful, and asked if he could kiss her “at least two times” during a field trip last year.

by Vinny Vella | Monday, April 6, 2026 | 4:53 PM EDT

John Richards IV spent a decade working as a teacher, dedicating his life, he told a judge Monday, to a vocation he felt was his calling.

But Richards, 58, ruined his career and his reputation by betraying the authority granted to him, Montgomery County Court Judge Risa Vetri Ferman said as she sentenced Richards to 9 to 23 months in jail for attempting to sexually assault a 13-year-old student.

ā€œThe actions that bring us here today are horrific,ā€ Ferman said. ā€œHe made a victim out of a girl who wanted nothing more than to be a student. There has to be a severe punishment, otherwise it would diminish the seriousness of this case.ā€

Richards, of Newtown Square, wrote a message in March 2025 to the girl, a student in his eighth-grade science class at Blockson Middle School in Norristown, telling her that she was beautiful, prosecutors said Monday. He asked permission to kiss her ā€œat least two timesā€ during a field trip to Washington he was chaperoning the next day.

So, Mr Richards was just plain stupid. He made all sorts of excuses for what he did — Mr Richards pleaded guilty to the charges — blaming loneliness among other things, but he wasn’t smart enough to look for women who were actually adults and not under his supervisory authority. Teachers cannot be unaware of what’s been happening to their fellow teachers when they try to form romantic or sexual relationships with minor students. His sentence is for stupidity as much as anything else.

ā€œLooking back at it now, Iā€™m appalled that I couldā€™ve done something so reprehensible,ā€ Richards said. ā€œI think I was in a bad, lonely place, and I was looking to be seen in any way possible.ā€

Richards blamed what he called a lapse in judgment on what he described as ineffective medication to treat his ADHD diagnosis. He asked the judge for leniency, saying that his three children had already been given life sentences by the ā€œcourt of public opinion.ā€

Well, of course he’s going to say anything he could to avoid jail!

But, what interested me more was that the newspaper published his photo[1]I chose to screen capture the newspaper’s Twitter blurb to publicize the story, rather than copy the one directly in the article, to avoid copyright issues. The Twitter feed is open to … Continue reading. The newspaper’s stated policy stated their reasons:

  • Because of longstanding racial disparities in arrest rates, mugshots disproportionately feature Black and Latinx people. Unrelenting, routine publication of such mugshots strengthens stereotypes and contributes to systemic racism.
  • Pre-conviction mugshots are inherently unfair, depicting suspects as criminals before guilt or innocence has been established.
  • Online, mugshots exist indefinitely, easily findable through search engines. Years after the alleged offense, mugshots on Inquirer.com or other news sites can make it harder for individuals to find jobs and move on with their lives.
  • Many published mugshots feature private individuals, charged with routine crimes. They are frequently published out of habit. The news value of these photos is often negligible

Mr Richards pleaded guilty, so the second reason would not apply to his case. However, Ashley Fisler, who was featured in the story we previously noted, has not been convicted, so the second listed reason should have applied.

Both Mr Richards and Miss Fisler are white; some might assume that, given the newspaper’s stated reasoning, the first reason given wouldn’t apply to them. But that third reason, that publishing the photos might make it more difficult for the accused to find new jobs and move on with their lives, certainly does apply. Mr Richards is 58, and the Inquirer’s story did not specify whether he will lose whatever retirement pension he has from the school system, but Miss Fisler is only 36; retirement is a long way away for her. Technically, neither photo is a mugshot, but shouldn’t the same reasons apply to other pictures?

It’s an obvious question: has the Inky changed its policies for accused sex offenders? If so, the newspaper should tell us!

References

References
↑1 I chose to screen capture the newspaper’s Twitter blurb to publicize the story, rather than copy the one directly in the article, to avoid copyright issues. The Twitter feed is open to retweeting, meaning that the newspaper is giving open permission to spread the story and the photo. Our regular readers — both of them — may have noticed that is our normal way of doing things. The photo used by the newspaper in the tweet is the same one published in the story, and which appeared on the newspaper’s website main page, as screen captured here on Tuesday, April 7th, at 10:55 AM EDT.
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Transgender-Affirming Specialist Ignores Reality

The tweet from Slate simply said, “The GOPā€™s most dangerous new policy just forced my family out of our home. Iā€™m afraid theyā€™re not done with us yet,” with a stock image of two blond children putting suitcases into the back of a suburban mother’s SUV. Naturally, I wondered what policy of the evil, reich-wing Donald Trump was kicking them out: families losing their homes because an illegal immigrant father had been picked up and kicked out, or a now former government employee losing her job and no longer being able to live in a high-cost subdivision in northern Virginia. But no, that wasn’t what it was. Rather, some #woke[1]From Wikipedia: WokeĀ (/ĖˆwoŹŠk/) as a political term ofĀ African-AmericanĀ origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerningĀ social justiceĀ andĀ racial justice.Ā It is derived from … Continue reading (supposed) adult pissed off because she couldn’t ‘transition’ her son or daughter into another sex.

The GOPā€™s Anti-Trans Crusade Already Forced Me to Move My Family. Iā€™m Still Not Sure Weā€™re Safe.

We thought our new state would be a haven after the last one turned on us. But I know the signs, and they arenā€™t looking good.

By Kalen D. Zeiger | Tuesday, March 10, 2026 | 11:04 AM

In May of 2020, my family moved so I could attend a clinical mental health doctorate program at the University of Iowa. I remember being so excited about the programā€™s LGBTQ Counseling Clinic, where I would be the assistant director and where I would get to focus on providing much-needed therapeutic care for queer folks. It was the deciding factor for me on what program I ended up attending.

At that time, I would never have predicted that the same clinic that had drawn me to Iowa would no longer exist when my family would be forced to flee the state in 2025.

I first read the article on my tablet, loaded via the tweet, while still in bed early this morning, but, of course, I needed my desktop to be able to write about it. That’s when I found out that Slate had the article hidden behind the paywall for a non-first visit. Undeterred, I Google searched for it elsewhere, and found it here as well.

At the beginning of our Iowa adventure, my kids were 9 and 12, and the plan was to stay at least until our oldest graduated from high school in 2026, if not longer. A few years into our time in the Hawkeye State, my oldest child came to us because they wanted to start on puberty blockers, since they were trans, and wanted to delay bodily changes that didnā€™t match their gender. When my child first came out, I was worried that because Iā€™m a trans clinician who works in gender-affirming mental health care, others would assume my childā€™s choices were influenced by me. I was very careful to make sure they knew that whether to pursue gender-affirming care was entirely their own choice. The most important thing was that they knew we loved them and that we would support whatever choice they made.

Really? Dr Zeiger claims that such was entirely “their” own choice, but one thing is clear: having a mother who “works in gender-affirming mental health care” doesn’t exactly lead to a parent telling a child the truth, that no amount of hormones or surgeries can actually change a boy into a girl or vice versa.

By early 2023, my 15-year-old was sure they wanted to start puberty blockers, so we followed the World Professional Association for Transgender Health standards to get them started, including getting a letter of support from a doctorate-level mental health clinician after a thorough evaluation. At first, my child felt relief and joy; they were glowing, and so happy that they could do something to slow the changes to their body that did not feel congruent with who they actually are. But that lightness would soon be crushed by a statewide ban on care for transgender minors.

Note that this was 2023, and while the author is blaming all of this on Donald Trump, he was not President at the time, and at the time, it appeared improbable that he’d ever be President again. Federal and state prosecutors were seeking some way, any way, to lock him up and keep him from ever running for President again. In 2023, Joe Biden was President and he and his woke staffers were pushing every possible means of supporting the cockamamie notion the girls could be boys and boys could be girls.

Kalen Zeiger, from Psychology Today.

The fact that children would be denied medically necessary, age-appropriate care did not matter to the fact that children would be denied medically necessary, age-appropriate care did not matter to the Iowa legislators who passed the ban. It did not matter to Iowa legislators that this ban didnā€™t change the fact that my child was transā€”something I think they believe (or at least hope) they can control. It did not matter that this ban meant my child would have to wait three more years to access a well-researched, basic standard of care supported by multiple professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, and more. It also did not matter that this ban means my child will have to undergo far more expensive and invasive procedures down the road than they would have if they had been able to stay on puberty blockers at 15. After years of unnecessary stress and pain, that child started gender-affirming care the week after they turned 18.” target=”_blank”>Iowa legislators who passed the ban. It did not matter to Iowa legislators that this ban didnā€™t change the fact that my child was transā€”something I think they believe (or at least hope) they can control. It did not matter that this ban meant my child would have to wait three more years to access a well-researched, basic standard of care supported by multiple professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, and more. It also did not matter that this ban means my child will have to undergo far more expensive and invasive procedures down the road than they would have if they had been able to stay on puberty blockers at 15. After years of unnecessary stress and pain, that child started gender-affirming care the week after they turned 18.

In the summer of 2025, we were packing our bags yet again. Less than a month after my child was finally able to access trans care, my two kids and I moved to Colorado. I had just spent the last five years completing a Ph.D. in Couple and Family Therapy and a Master of Arts in Educational Measurement and Statistics. My now-18-year-old, a summer baby, had one more year of high school left. Where originally we wanted to make sure they were not moved mid-high-school, we now desperately did not want them coming of age in the state whose legislature had just voted to roll back civil rights protections from trans people like them and myself, including the right to be free from discrimination when it comes to education, employment, housing, and existing in public.

There’s a lot more in the article, and I don’t want to quote it all, but note from that final paragraph, in which Dr Zeiger referred to rolling back civil rights protections from trans people “like them and myself.”

Dr Zeiger was very careful in her article to avoid any indications of whether she was male or female, whether her “partner” or “spouse” was male or female, and whether her child was biologically male or female, though it’s obvious from her professional photographs that the author was born female. I haven’t seen any photos of her now 18 or 19-year-old child, but if it is obvious that Dr Zeiger is biologically female, regardless of how she chooses to present herself, and the guy at the right is male, regardless of his clothing, hair, and earrings, one would hope that the author told her child that “they” would almost certainly be recognized as “their” biological sex rather than the sex “they” pretended to be.

Try a little experiment the next time you are out driving or walking around. When you see an adult 80 yards away, a person with his back turned to you and wearing just blue jeans and a shirt, can you tell if that person is male or female just from that? If your eyesight is good, of course you can, because males and females are built differently. Males are normally taller than females, but proportionally women have longer legs and shorter upper bodies than men. The ability to distinguish between sexes of their own species is something that every bird, every reptile, and every mammal has instinctively; only liberal humans have managed to ‘educate’ that ability out of themselves.

Henry Berg-Brousseau is seen with his politician mother Karen, father Bob, a marketing director, and sister Rachael, a rabbi. Photo from the Daily Mail. Click to enlarge.

We previously noted, in December of 2022, the suicide of “Henry” Berg-Brousseau, the daughter of Kentucky state Senator Karen Berg, who thought that she really was a man. She was given every opportunity, with a supportive father and quack physician mother, and apparently supportive friends.

But I included a photo of the Berg-Brousseau family. In it, ā€œHenryā€ ā€” I have been unable to find her real name ā€” is shown, seemingly shorter than her mother and sister, and certainly shorter than her father, as well as significantly overweight. Were she an actual boy who grew up that way, ā€œheā€™dā€ have been the last picked for a team in Phys Ed, and been dateless as high school girls, real girls, would have rejected ā€œhimā€ for more masculine guys. As an adult, she might somehow ā€˜passā€™ as a male, if no one asked any questions, but sheā€™d have been the least impressive of ā€˜guysā€™.

Dr Berg claimed that Miss Berg-Brousseau believed that she was at risk, I assume from violence, walking out in public, but, in the end, the person from whom she wasnā€™t safe was not evil tormenters, but from herself. Had she been an actual boy who grew up to look the way she looked, sheā€™d have had to get used to the kinds of insults that all boys growing up not masculine enough hear. But Dr Berg wants to blame her daughterā€™s suicide on people who recognize that her ā€œtransgender sonā€ was actually her daughter, and refused to lie about it.

The truth is simple: no matter that the Kinks sang that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, it’s simply not true. As “a Ph.D. in Couple and Family Therapy and a Master of Arts in Educational Measurement and Statistics,” Dr Zeiger ought to be able to recognize that, but as a female who thinks she’s male, she has subordinated reality to what she apparently wants. Normal people just don’t do that.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

WokeĀ (/ĖˆwoŹŠk/) as a political term ofĀ African-AmericanĀ origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerningĀ social justiceĀ andĀ racial justice.Ā It is derived from theĀ African-American Vernacular EnglishĀ expression ā€œstay wokeā€œ, whoseĀ grammatical aspectĀ refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s,Ā wokeĀ had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the termsĀ woke cultureĀ andĀ woke politicsĀ also being used). It has been the subject ofĀ memesĀ and ironic usage.Ā Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of theĀ Black Lives MatterĀ movement.

I shall confess to sometimes ā€œironic usageā€ of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ā€˜wokeā€™ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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#TrumpDerangementSyndrome I can understand not liking the way the Iranian government was struck, but it boggles my mind than any sane person can be sad about it.

As I have previously noted, I was not in favor of the United States launching the attack on Iran; I most certainly wanted the clerical government to fall, and freedom to come to that country, but I wanted the people of Iran to do the job, not have is do so. That said, it is very heartening that so many of the Iranian leadership have been sent to Jahannam and their 72 bacha bazi boys. It’s far too early to know what kind of government will arise from the attack, and leading people like the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky, who admits to proceeding from a position that he “consider(s) Trump a walking malignancy in virtually every imaginable way, a cruel charlatan and sociopath who has done untold damage to the nation and world over the years,” to write that it’s improbable that things will eventually turn out decently.

But at some point you have to wonder about the Westerners demonstrating in support of the now late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the oppressive Iranian government. Under the mad clerics, Iran was sponsoring anti-Western and especially anti-Jewish terrorism anywhere they could. The October 7th massacre was launched by Hamas, but they could only do so due to the monetary and war materiel support they received from Iran. Iran wanted the war to hold up the movement of Saudi Arabia to sign on to the Abraham Accords, because the last thing the mullahs wanted was peace between Israel and the Arab nations. Are American liberals so consumed with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome that they’d rather see girls executed for being raped, women slain for not wearing the hijab properly, and homosexuals publicly hanged by construction cranes than President Trump get a major foreign policy win?

Yes, of course that’s a rhetorical question; that’s exactly how some of our leftists feel. If Mr Trump cured cancer, they’d combitch that he was putting doctors and nurses out of work. Our left have become so stupid that they are going to support people who would happily kill them as long as those people are opposed to Western civilization. They use their freedom of speech and of the press to disseminate views in support of people and governments which would deny them freedom of speech and of the press.

The left try to tell us that they are just so much smarter than we evil, reich-wing conservatives, so much more educated, yet it seems that, today at least, when Mr Trump is in office at least, that they are a dumb as a box of rocks. I can understand not liking the way the Iranian government was struck, but it boggles my mind than any sane person can be sad about it.

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Now you know why I call it Journolism! ** Updated! 9:05 PM EST ** #FreedomOfThePress includes the right not to publish what you don't want to publish, but concealing uncomfortable facts hurts the media's reputation

In the wake of the roughly 300 layoffs at The Washington Post, there has been a lot of blame spread, both among the subscribers who quit for owner Jeff Bezos refusing to endorse Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024, and the paper itself for it’s very liberal leanings. The Post managed to piss off both the conservatives who might have been willing to subscribe, and the liberals who cancelled their subscriptions. Mr Bezos, in trying to fix a long-ongoing problem, fouled up.

But let me be clear here: the Freedom of the Press includes the freedom not to publish something. That should be obvious: there are only so many pages a newspaper can print, though with digital publishing these days, those limits have expanded.

And now we see just what isn’t being published, when it doesn’t fit Teh Narrative. When the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in a small town in northeast British Columbia occurred, the Associated Press told us, at 8:59 AM EST, that the (alleged) killer was a “woman” and a “female suspect.” At 9:32 AM EST, CNN simply identified the killer as “they,” being careful to not use a pronoun to specify the killer’s sex. At 9:32 AM EST, The New York Times told us nothing about the shooter.

But, as early as 6:48 AM EST, Matt Van Swol was telling us on Twitter the news which was not politically correct, that the killer was a mentally ill boy who thought he was a girl. I checked the credentialed media, and found several instances of the media concealing the knowledge that the (alleged) killer was transgender.

The killer’s name is Jesse Van Rootselaar, though initially identified as Jesse Strang, 18 years old, and yes, he’s transgender.

I don’t get it. The credentialed media want to build trust in their accuracy, so why conceal information that they know will come out soon enough?

My spelling ā€˜journolistā€™ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. And now you know why I spell it that way.

Well, eventually even The New York Times had to admit what had previously been revealed, that young Mr Van Rootselaar was the killer, and that the “suspect” was born as biologically male and chose to identify as a female about six years ago. That acknowledgement was time-stamped at 2:45 PM EST, just three minutes short of eight hours after Mr Van Swol’s tweet. The Times also revealed that the “suspect” had quit school four years earlier, which would have meant he wasn’t in school since age 14.

From the Times at 3:19 PM EST:

ā€œPolice had attended that residence on a number of occasions over the last several years dealing with concerns of mental health with our suspect,ā€ Dwayne McDonald, the deputy commissioner, said, referring to the home where the suspectā€™s mother and stepbrother were found dead. On one of those occasions, ā€œfirearms were seized.ā€ The most recent police call to the residence was in the spring of last year.

So, the local police already knew that young Mr Van Rootselaar was just plain nuts. Isn’t being biologically one sex but believing you are the other one definition of just plain nuts?

Of course, the newspaper continued to use the feminine pronouns to refer to the killer, as did local officials, because for some stupid reason they think a guy calling himself a girl really is a girl; are the editors and writers at the Times just as nuts as Mr Van Rootselaar?

Yeah, I think that they are!

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A half-hearted defense of Jeff Bezos

I have frequently said that I appreciated billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for buying The Washington Post from the Graham family in 2013. The family didn’t really want to sell the newspaper, but the Post was losing money every year, and they just couldn’t afford to keep it going. We don’t know when the Grahams would have had to declare bankruptcy, but it couldn’t have been much longer.

Mr Bezos, for his part, mostly kept his hands off the newspaper. But losses continued to mount, reportedly $100 million in 2023, $77 million in 2024, and $100 million again in 2025. The owner could afford to keep things going the way they were, but finally decided that enough is enough.

Naturally Twitter — I still refuse to call it š• — was full of sob stories about the poor, poor laid off journalists, and I have sympathy for them as well: I hate to see anyone who hasn’t broken the law lose his job. But then I saw this from WUSA CBS Channel 9:

The situation we are in right now is entirely up to the abysmal mismanagement by The Washington Post leaders,” said Sarah Kaplan, a climate reporter with The Washington Post.

Kaplan says she takes issue with the positioning that the publication is losing subscribers because of the quality of work of her colleagues. She says the layoffs are going to have a profound impact on the already empty newsrooms. “I don’t know how I go back to work and do my job without all the people who were laid off yesterday,” she added.

To judge from the way she phrased it, Miss Kaplan is one of those who was not laid off. But this brought to mind another story, from my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach:

From that Climate Colored Goggles link in the first tweet

The Washington Post produced some of Americaā€™s finest climate journalism over the last decade, aggressively covering President Trumpā€™s regulatory rollbacks and winning a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Earthā€™s fastest-warming places. Alongside the New York Times and the Associated Press, I donā€™t think any U.S. news outlet published a greater volume of urgent, high-quality climate and clean energy coverage.

Everything changed on Wednesday morning.

The Post sent layoff notices to at least 14 climate journalists, newsroom sources told me, part of a massive round of cost-cutting that will see more than 300 journalists lose their jobs ā€” about 30% of all employees at the Jeff Bezos-owned company.

The climate team layoffs include eight writer/reporters, an editor and several video, data and graphics journalists, Iā€™m told. Iā€™m not publishing their names, since many of them havenā€™t discussed their situations publicly. But to see the invaluable work they and their colleagues have been doing, check out the Postā€™s climate page here.

But, what are they really producing? How many articles? Anything of consequence? I rarely use the WP for my climate posts, and I rarely see any other Skeptics using their articles. Sounds like they are cutting a lot of bloat and dead weight. The WP is a business meant to make money, but are losing a ton because the product is bad.

If Phil Kerpen’s chart is correct, between 2020 and 2022, the Post’s global warming climate change reportorial staff increased six-fold in size. The department was cut back to 19 by 2025, so I suppose Miss Kaplan had plenty of friends, and is understandably distraught that 14 of them are now unemployed.

From Miss Kaplan’s biography:

Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter covering humanity’s response to a warming world. Her job has taken her to a research camp atop the Greenland ice sheet, a shrinking glacier in the Peruvian Andes, Indian Ocean islands threatened by sea level rise and disaster-struck communities across the United States. She was part of the team of Post journalists recognized as a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for coverage of Hurricane Helene’s human and environmental toll. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe at The Post.

Greenland, the Peruvian Andes, islands in the Indian Ocean? That sounds like a lot of money spent by a company which has lost $277 million over the last three years. Perhaps, just perhaps, Mr Bezos hasn’t really seen much of a return on the newspaper’s spending on this.

Then I saw this thanks to the tweet shown at the left by Streiff from RedState.

Just seventeen bylines — I assume that’s how Streiff researched it — in three months does not exactly seem like top productivity to me. If you were looking to cut costs, wouldn’t the least productive employees be the ones you’d lay off first?

There was my good friend Heather Long, who got out when the getting was good thanks to getting other job offers, who was sent several times to the cover the hoitiest and the toitiest at the World Economic Forum in the ski resort town of Davos in Switzerland. That’s the kind of thing you’d expect the newspaper to cover, but it was still an expensive trip to an expensive event. Perhaps the new Post will rely on Associated Press coverage?

But, as I said, this would be a half-hearted defense of Mr Bezos. Where, I have to ask, were the editors and managers who should have been seeing the less productive employees all along, the bosses who should have known, after the long series of business losses, that the fat needed to be trimmed, that economy and efficiency measures needed to be taken? That such wasn’t happening all along is directly on Mr Bezos, and the people he put in place to do that very thing.

Then there was the idiocy of canceling the endorsement of Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024. Upon resuming editorial endorsements of Presidential candidates in 1976, the newspaper had always endorsed the Democratic candidate if they endorsed anyone at all, and the endorsement editorial was (supposedly) already written when Mr Bezos spiked it. Yes, Mrs Emhoff was as big a doofus as Mike Dukakis, the last Democratic presidential nominee the newspaper didn’t endorse — no endorsement was made in 1988 — but in the #TrumpDerangementSyndrome atmosphere in Washington and among the newspaper’s subscribers, it should have been allowed to go ahead, because it would have made exactly no difference in the outcome of the election, and the Post would not have lost a quarter million subscribers over the endorsement being spiked. Had Mr Bezos taken that decision in May, using as he did a return to the tradition of the newspaper not making any such endorsements, it would have been accepted, or after the election, in which it could have been easily accepted.

Then came the announcement of a change in editorial positions, to a more libertarian philosophy, and another 75,000 digital subscribers said, “See ya!” The change could have been made without the announcement, and without running off 75,000 subscribers.

At my old digital subscription rate of $129.00 per year, losing 325,000 subscribers means a loss of $41,925,000 in revenue. That’s a fairly substantial part of the reported $100 million loss for 2025.

So the newspaper is now offering new digital subscribers a first year for $40, which renews at $140 a year subsequently. I even made the “subscribe” button active for readers. But the newspaper would have lost a lot less money if Jeff Bezos hadn’t run off a bunch of current subscribers.

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The subscription losses at The Washington Post say more about the subscribers than the newspaper itself

As would be expected, the whole of the professional media have been reacting to the significant layoffs at The Washington Post. I do not normally read Frank Luntz, but, lazing in bed this frosty morning, and scrolling through Twitter — I still refuse to call it š• — I clicked on the linked article from the BBC. It was not particularly different from dozens of others, until I got to the very last paragraph:

The Post’s financial woes and falling subscriber base stand in contrast to The New York Times, which reported on Wednesday that it added about 450,000 digital-only subscribers in the last quarter of 2025.

Thud!

Clearly, the Times had been doing something right, while the Post has been doing things wrong.

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.

Since the newspaper started making presidential candidate endorsements in the 1970s, every time they have made one, it was an endorsement of the Democratic candidate. That includes Walter Mondale in 1984, who went on to lose every state except Minnesota, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and so on and so on. In 2016, while the Post listed her many failures, the editors expressed enthusiasm for the odious Hillary Clinton. The newspaper endorsed the semi-comatose Joe Biden in 2020; if conservative bloggers could see that Mr Biden was in serious decline even before the election, surely the reporters who covered him could see it up close, but they all kept it quiet. And while owner Jeff Bezos spiked it, there was an apparently already written endorsement of the inept Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024.

The Post’s subscribers simply expected an endorsement of Mrs Emhoff, and 250,000+ cancelled subscriptions later, everyone knew it.

Another 75,000 digital subscriptions were cancelled following an announced change to the opinion section to a more libertarian leaning.

To me, this says more about the subscribers the newspaper lost than it does about the Post. Over 325,000 now former subscribers wanted to read pablum that matched their political beliefs than the actual news. Mr Bezos apparently believed that the newspaper could stem its losses by becoming more appealing to normal people, but it has apparently not worked.

So, what has the Times been doing right? Part of it stems from their tremendous reputation as the newspaper of record for the United States. And part stems from the fact that while the newspaper editorially supports liberals, the news sections are mostly balanced.

While I regret that the Post lost so many subscribers, I take some schadenfreude satisfaction that the 325,000+ former subscribers were gnashing their teeth and screaming in apoplexy on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

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The losses at The Washington Post It looks like the people who took the earlier buyouts were the smart ones

As someone who has a great fondness for newspapers — I delivered them when I was a teenager, and, being mostly deaf now, I have to read the news, not watch it on television — I was greatly pleased when billionaire Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post from the Graham family, which could no longer afford to keep it running, saving the newspaper from disaster. We previously noted that while Mr Bezos has a currently guesstimated net worth of $248.5 billion, a mere single-digit billionaire like Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns The Los Angeles Times, and his paltry $8.1 billion had to cut costs as his newspaper was hemorrhaging money.

It seems, however, that while Mr Bezos can afford the money losses at the Post, he appears to have decided that he needs to reduce the blood loss.

Washington Post says one-third of its staff across all departments is being laid off

Staff members in the newsroom were told they would be getting emails with one of two subject lines, announcing that the personā€™s role has or hasnā€™t been eliminated.

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 | 9:57 AM EST | Updated: 10:19 AM EST

The Washington Post is laying off one-third of its staff in the newsroom and other departments, a brutal blow at one of journalismā€™s most legendary brands.

The troubled Post began implementing large-scale cutbacks on Wednesday, including eliminating its sports department and shrinking the number of journalists it stations overseas. The changes were announced by executive editor Matt Murray in a Zoom meeting with staff.

The staff reduction is a significant psychic blow at the Post, known in history books for its Watergate revelations and most recently for aggressive coverage of President Donald Trumpā€™s cutbacks to the federal workforce, and for journalism in general.

Staff members in the newsroom were told they would be getting emails with one of two subject lines, announcing that the personā€™s role has or hasnā€™t been eliminated. A Post representative confirmed that one-third of the staff would be cut, without saying how many total employees the newspaper has.

I guess that my good friend Heather Long got out at the Post just in time, because she now works as the Chief Economist for Navy Federal Credit Union!

Sadly, this is not something unexpected: the Post had already been making cuts, and trying to meet Mr Bezos’ requirement that the newspaper try to break even. However, it was Mr Bezos’ decision not to allow the newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris Emhoff which cost the newspaper around a quarter million paying subscribers. Since the newspaper had obviously been supporting the then-Vice President in every way other than the spiked endorsement, I fail to see how letting the endorsement be made would have changed the election, but spiking it certainly cost the Post money.

Mr Bezos defended his decision in the pages of the newspaper, saying “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” but if the Post reported on its own layoffs, I did not see it on the newspaper’s website front page or in a search for layoffs.

Perhaps the newspaper should have read its own masthead tagline, because if “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” added as a protest to President Trump during his first term, is keeping the readership in darkness about the newspaper’s layoffs really that great an idea?

It would take someone with Mr Bezos’ money, as Dr Soon-Shiong’s worried have demonstrated, to buy the newspaper from him. I once suggested that he simply give the Post to his ex, Mackenzie Scott, net worth $30.8 billion, because she likes giving away her money, and, for newspaper owners today, giving away their money really is what they have to do.

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Is this really what he wants? Revolutions so rarely turn out the way people expect

Will Bunch, the far-left columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, perhaps sees himself as a noble, freedom fighter, a brave partisan fighting the evil forces of fascism. In a skeet on Thursday, he told us that, “The only story w/ value is the revolution, like the MLPS general strike.”

My mind went to the scene in Dr Zhivago, in which Tom Courtenay, playing Pavel “Pasha” Antipov, meets Rod Steiger, playing Viktor Komarovsky, in a restaurant, and Pasha tells Viktor that he is committed to the Revolution. After the Soviet Revolution, Pasha becomes Strelnikov, a murderous Bolshevik Red Guard leader, galivanting around on his private train burning villages in the civil war against the Whites. Then, as the civil war is ending, he has abandoned his role there and was struggling — off camera — to where his estranged wife, Lara Antipova, has been living, pursued by the Bolsheviks who no longer had any use for him.

It’s all very Josef Stalin/Leon Trotsky in a way, and the novel by Boris Pasternak was published in 1957, long after Comrade Stalin had Comrade Trotsky murdered in Mexico City.

I am also reminded of the anti-fascist song Bella Ciao, in a video below the fold: Continue reading →