Tag Archives: #FreedomOfThePress

Posted on by

The journolism of NBC News Can you trust anything from NBC News these days?

That’s not a typographical error in the headline! The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Though I spent two years writing for the Kentucky Kernel, I was not actually a journalism student; my degree is not in journalism. But I do know enough to recognize thoroughly biased ‘reporting’ when I see it.

So here you go: from NBC News:

Kyle Rittenhouse hospitalized following bite from venomous spider

“The communists couldn’t take me out and i’ll be damned if I let a brown recluse take me out,” said the gunman who opened fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Aug. 5, 2020.

By David K. Li | Thursday, May 7, 2026 | 10:42 AM EDT | Updated” 11:44 AM EDT

Kyle Rittenhouse, who gained fame for opening fire at a 2020 civil rights rally in Wisconsin, was hospitalized after a venomous spider bit him, the noted firearms enthusiast said Wednesday.

Did you catch that? In both the subtitle and the first paragraph, reporter David K Li used the description “opened fire” and “opening fire,” as though Mr Rittenhouse stood on top of a platform, put his weapon on spray and pray, and raked a (peaceful?) crowd indiscriminately, like a Philadelphia gang-banger.

Rittenhouse, 23, told his 100,000 followers on X that he fell victim to a brown recluse, posting pictures of himself in a hospital bed strapped to monitors with one close-up shot of the bite mark.

“The spider, like the commies, also thought it was a good idea to come after me while I was armed,” Rittenhouse posted. “He did not survive.”

Rittenhouse appeared to be in good spirits, joking that his only disappointment was that “I’m not Spider-Man now.”

He did not say exactly when or where the spider attack happened.

Rittenhouse’s post, predictably, drew thousands of responses — a mix of support and mockery.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was among the first and highest-profile well-wishers, telling Rittenhouse “you got this.”

“Thank you, Senator,” Rittenhouse responded Thursday.

Others came at him with body-shaming ridicule, which the shirtless, stout Rittenhouse didn’t appear to respond to.

Rittenhouse became a household name in late summer 2020 after he fatally shot two men and wounded a third during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

There’s more at the original, and though Mr Li did note that Mr Rittenhouse was tried for “killing Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and wounding paramedic Gaige Grosskreutz during the melee”, there is absolutely no mention made that Mr Rittenhouse was backing away when he was attacked by Messrs Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz. The article did note that he testified in his own defense, claimed the men were shot in self-defense, and that the jury acquitted him on all charges.

Mr Li added hyperlinks to three of his previous articles, plus a fourth, all in the paragraph above, in which he declined to note that Mr Rosenbaum had mental issues and had spent most of his adult life in prison for sexually molesting underaged boys, Mr Huber “had spent time in prison twice, first for violating probation after strangling his brother and again for kicking his sister,” same link, and Mr Grosskreutz was pointing a firearm at Mr Rittenhouse as he was shot, again, same link. The link is to an article by National Public Radio, not some evil, reich-wing source.

If Mr Li’s article was your only source of information, you might be inclined to think that yes, Mr Rittenhouse was the a perched on a platform, mowing down mostly peaceful protesters. That’s journolism, not real journalism.

Mr Li covered the trial and most of the story for NBC News, and was absolutely aware that Mr Rittenhouse was thrice attacked, in succession, by the three men, two of whom were previously convicted felons, and the third armed and pointing his weapon at the defendant at the time he was shot, but he chose not to tell his readers that. His article was not something limited by the old 750-word limit, but had the freedom of the twenty-first century, and virtually unlimited bandwidth.

Both the reporter and his editor — there are editors at NBC, right? — had to have known the article was biased, and had to have known that the case was famous enough that [insert plural slang term for the anus here] like me would notice it, but apparently they just didn’t care. One thing is certain: you cannot trust Mr Li to tell the whole truth in any of his reporting, and NBC News itself must be suspect. The days of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley are in the distant past for NBC News.

Posted on by

No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! It's far more important to protect criminal suspects than it is to protect law-abiding people.

Русский? Я никогда не знал русского по имени Саидахмад.

I saw this tweet from Northeast Philly Degenerate, and of course I snarked, “Russian? I’ve never known a Russian named Saidakhmad.” As it turns out, the Philadelphia Police came to the same conclusion, that they are probably of central Asian descent.

At 4:52 PM EDT, two hours and twelve minutes later, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s after hours reporter, Robrt Moran, published the newspaper’s own story on the crime:

6 men rob, commit assaults at massage business near Chinatown, police say

One of the six men who fled from the roof of the business on the 400 block of North Ninth Street was arrested, police said.

by Robert Moran | Monday, April 27, 2026 | 4:52 PM EDT

Six young men robbed at gunpoint and committed sexual assaults at a massage business just north of Chinatown early Saturday, Philadelphia police said.

The men forced their way into the business on the 400 block of North Ninth Street about 4:40 a.m., police said Monday.

When police arrived, the men “fled from the roof,” the police department said.

One suspect was caught on the roof, police said.

Saidakhmad Bakiev, 18, of Northeast Philadelphia, was charged with rape, robbery, aggravated assault, criminal conspiracy, burglary, false imprisonment, sexual assault, indecent assault, and related offenses.

In keeping with the newspaper’s policy of not publishing mugshots, Mr Moran did not include one of the accused. But Mr Moran did include two hyperlinks which did lead to such. One wonders if he’ll be called on the carpet for that.

The link to the Philadelphia Police Department’s press release included photos of the five suspects on the lam. The remaining suspects “are described as white males, late teens into their 20’s, dark hair, possibly Russian/Central Asian descent.” No information on their immigration status was included, but if Mr Bakiev is an immigrant, I’m sure that Will Bunch will defend him at all costs.

The 400 block of North Ninth Street is no great place, a neighborhood of low rent businesses, ill-kept sidewalks, and vacant lots with overgrown grass behind chain link fences. “Massage parlors” are not usually considered high-class businesses.

One would think that the newspaper of record for not only the city but the metropolitan area as well, my unlimited digital subscription for which is $6.99 per week, $363.48 per year, would be more concerned with the safety of the decent people in the City of Brotherly Love, be more willing to include the photos of the (alleged) malefactors, to get the aid of the public in identifying them and helping the Philadelphia Police to capture the suspects, but apparently if one did think that, he’d be wrong, wrong, wrong! It’s far more important to protect criminal suspects than it is to protect law-abiding people.

Posted on by

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 Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, and now we’re seeing supposedly professional journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ 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: 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, 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 ‘journolist’ 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:

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 the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
Posted on by

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.

“The actions that bring us here today are horrific,” Ferman said. “He 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.”

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 “at least two times” 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.

“Looking back at it now, I’m appalled that I could’ve done something so reprehensible,” Richards said. “I think I was in a bad, lonely place, and I was looking to be seen in any way possible.”

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 “court of public opinion.”

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.
Posted on by

#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.

Posted on by

The utter idiocy of anti-Semitism Anti-Semitism has no place among real Catholics

Carrie Prejean Boller is a very attractive young lady with a very ugly soul. She claims to be a Roman Catholic, but I have to ask: is her Bible just one of those small New Testaments that the Gideons leave in hotel nightstands? Does she cover her ears during the first reading on Sunday Mass, which is normally from the Old Testament, the ancient Jewish scriptures? Does she sit there stone-faced during the responsorial psalm, the works primarily of David, King of Israel and Judah? What does she do when most American Catholic parishes sing Oh come, oh, come, Emmanuel at the beginning of Advent?

She even depicted herself as St Joan of Arc, though, amusingly enough, she had images of Jesus and Mary, who were both Jews, in the background.

I don’t know how often she attends Mass, but she at least tweeted support when the late Charlie Kirk talked about his family going to Mass every week.

But there she is, ranting about “Zionists” and “Zios”, and supporting the Palestinians who, if they actually achieved the Islamist government they want, would put her into chattel sex slavery to a much older Muslim man, assuming that they didn’t just slit her throat.

Christianity does not exist without Judaism! The majority of our Bible are the ancient Jewish scriptures, which give us the laws of God and the prophesies of the Messiah being sent to us, foretold by Jewish prophets. Jesus himself was Jewish, born into a Jewish family, and teaching in synagogues. If Miss Boller take communion, receives the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist, she is imitating Jesus and the Apostles as they gathered together for a Passover meal!

There is, however, more than just religion involved in this. Israel is our easternmost bastion of Western civilization, of freedom, democracy, religious tolerance, and free enterprise. Miss Boller can rage and rant about the Jooooos all she wants on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — because she enjoys the freedom of speech and of the press that the West provides. It’s not just those freedoms, but the existence of technology almost entirely developed in the West, including in Israel, that gives her the means to express her opinions beyond her physical circle of friends. From the first printing press, to the development of radio, and then television, and that internet thingy that Al Gore invented, she is benefitting from the technology developed in the West. Biz Stone, one of the four creators of Twitter, which she uses to attack Jews, is himself Jewish.

If she uses a cellular phone, she is using technology that was in significant part developed in Israel. If she has been vaccinated for polio, she has been kept safe by one of the two vaccines, both of which were developed by Jews.

Anti-Semitism has no place in the developed world, because so much of what has made us the modern world was developed by people of Jewish heritage. And anti-Semitism has no place in the Catholicism she claims.

The Israel she hates so much? I have been, all too briefly, to Jerusalem, I have gone to Mass in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, I have been to the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane, I have walked the Via Dolorosa, all things important to Catholics, and all things protected and preserved by Israel.

The Muslims she champions? ISIS destroyed ancient relics in Syria and Iraq, because they considered them idolatrous, while the Taliban of Afghanistan destroyed several ancient sites and a library, for the same reasons. If the Islamists won in the Holy Land, if they drove the Jews into the sea, there is no particular reason to believe that they would be any less destructive of Christian sites.

But I just saw where she called Candace Owens brave, simply more proof that she hates the Jooooos.

Posted on by

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 ‘journolist’ 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:

“Police had attended that residence on a number of occasions over the last several years dealing with concerns of mental health with our suspect,” Dwayne McDonald, the deputy commissioner, said, referring to the home where the suspect’s mother and stepbrother were found dead. On one of those occasions, “firearms were seized.” 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!

Posted on by

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 𝕏 — 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 America’s finest climate journalism over the last decade, aggressively covering President Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and winning a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Earth’s fastest-warming places. Alongside the New York Times and the Associated Press, I don’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 — 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, I’m told. I’m not publishing their names, since many of them haven’t discussed their situations publicly. But to see the invaluable work they and their colleagues have been doing, check out the Post’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.

Posted on by

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 𝕏 — 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.