I almost wrote a column about The Washington Post’s new but increasingly clear editorial slant last week after I read the editorial headlined “In defense of the White House ballroom.” That’s the kind of headline, opening with “in defense of,” that might be tongue-in-cheek; a bit catty. But no, it was a dull, moronic, straightforward defense of the president of the United States crushing to dust one-third of a building of singular historic importance that is owned by the American people, and doing so while not merely ignoring but saying a colossal fuck you to the rules and procedures that normally govern such changes.
I almost did, but I didn’t. It’s one editorial, I thought. We all swing and miss sometimes, myself very much included. But then came this weekend’s gem, “The unaffordability of Obamacare comes home to roost.” Add the recent hiring of three conservative columnists, presumably recruited to advance owner Jeff Bezos’s passion for “personal liberties and free markets,” and it’s hard to argue with the assessment of Post columnist Marc Thiessen, once a token right-wing outlier, who not long ago crowed: “We’re now a conservative opinion page.”
It is The Washington Post’s right, of course, to stand for whatever it and its owner wish it to stand for. If the owner of this magazine woke up tomorrow and decided that Murray Rothbard was right about everything and The New Republic was henceforth going to follow the Cato Institute line on all matters, that would be his right, and I’d ungrudgingly go look for new employment. That’s how this business works.
So this is not a liberal whine that the Post “ought” to be liberal, although it is worth pointing out that (a) this shift effectively defenestrates 50 or 60 years of proud history, (b) a conservative stance puts the paper in a very bad odor indeed with respect to the city it purports to serve, and (c) the paper has bled enormous polemical talent over the last couple of years: Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank (still at the paper but no longer a columnist), and not least Greg Sargent and Perry Bacon, about whom I’m delighted to say that the Post’s loss is TNR’s gain. (Here’s a bonus fun fact: No matter how hard the Post swings in this reactionary rightward direction, The Wall Street Journal got there first, and they do it better.)
My point rather is that liberals, especially those of the multimillionaire and billionaire variety, need to pay close attention to this phenomenon. The nation’s capital is now served by two editorially conservative newspapers: the Post and the Unification Church’s Washington Times, still going … well, one can’t quite say “strong.” I never hear anyone talk about it or see someone link to one of its stories or columns on social media. Never. I realize they’re not exactly my crowd, but this wasn’t always the case—it seemed to me that during the Reagan and Bush 43 eras, the Times mattered more than it does now. There’s also arguably a third, The Washington Examiner. It’s now online only, but it’s a tabloid newspaper in its DNA, and very conservative.
So, chew on that: The nation’s capital, a city that is the seat of the federal government and home to many thousands of public servants, and a city that Democratic presidential candidates generally carry with around 90 percent of the vote, has three conservative voices and no longer has a single liberal newspaper.
The Post continues to do lots of excellent, and vital, reporting. But the editorial voice still matters. So when it praises Trump’s destruction of the East Wing to make way for his Peacock Throne ballroom, to see the Post try to flatter Trump by calling the move “a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere” (a take that TNR’s Tim Noah effectively demolished) tells us something about the kind of favor the Post is now trying to curry—Amazon is a donor to the ballroom project, by the way—not to mention the laxity of its logical rigor (NIMBYs? In precisely whose “backyard” does the White House sit?).
And then to read yesterday that the shutdown and the current fight over health care subsidies are essentially the Democrats’ fault because they made this ungainly and expensive health care mess in the first place through the creation of Obamacare—well, it’s a big bread crumb dropped along the trail showing where the Post is headed. The editorial argues, accurately, that our health care system is a Rube Goldberg mess. Yet it proposes no particular fix. The editorial writers at the Post are canny enough, at this gestational stage in their transition, not to show their hand in terms of announcing what kind of system they’d prefer. I’m guessing we’re a year or so away from the “Health savings accounts: An idea whose time has come” editorial.
I have said this before, and I’ll say it again here: We are at most a few years away from the mainstream media becoming controlled top to bottom, with a few very exceptions, by ultrarich conservatives and their hirelings. CBS News is gone; CNN seems about to follow. The Los Angeles Times installed an AI-powered “bias meter” to warn readers against taking some of what they read in the paper’s columns at face value. And all across the country, local news is on a ventilator; the right-wing Sinclair network is taking over everywhere, and the Trump Federal Communications Commission is lending a hand.
What is to be done? Well, some say this doesn’t really matter that much—people get their news from TikTok, so liberals should focus on social media, podcasts, YouTube. I have no beef with this argument. Liberals are way behind conservatives in these realms. But legacy media outlets still matter because of who reads them. And they are being taken over by right-wing and libertarian billionaires who want quite simply to destroy the idea of the public weal.
So this is what is to be done: Rich liberals need to get together, see all this for the democracy-ending crisis that it is, and pool tens of millions of dollars into an organization that will buy existing media outlets (traditional and social) and start new ones. They have been asleep to this problem for 20-plus years. Well, as one of my favorite proverbs has it, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second-best time is now. If The Washington Post becoming right-wing doesn’t make these people want to take spade in hand and plant some trees, what on earth will?
