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The Washington Post is a light in dark places when all other lights go out.

New Line Cinema

As Twitter has discovered today, the Post has quietly updated its homepage banner to accommodate the new slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The slogan was first rolled out on Snapchat before making its way to the website’s front page, where the paper’s full audience could take it in—and subsequently mock it for sounding a whole lot like the official family words for House WaPo or a nugget of unusually contemporary Gandalf wisdom.

The origins of the phrase are fuzzy—according to WaPo communications VP Kris Coratti, it’s been a popular idiom among the staff for years. Apparently it’s been a longtime favorite of Bob Woodward (he’s been quoted as saying it as far back as 2010) and was parroted by Post owner/ambivalent Trump collaborator Jeff Bezos at least as early as May 2016, at a company event.

While it’s easy to make fun of the slogan’s grandiosity (as plenty on the right have been doing) and all the hard consonant alliteration, it is difficult to fault the sentiment in the same week that our president publicly branded the press the enemy of the American people. It’s too bad, then, that Coratti denied the move had anything to do with Trump.