The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups.
The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself. (And there would always be an important David Ignatius column, or a great scoop on some governmental scandal that made it worth the cost.)
But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster.
I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.
But as Mary Katharine Ham writes, something bad did happen on a national scale, and we can measure how newspapers like the Post met the moment:
The Post went full Alinsky-style “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” on Eric Clapton in 2021, because he was a prominent celebrity (who makes his living playing music in sold-out hockey arenas) who disagreed with the official lockdown policy to fight covid, and dared disclose he had a bad reaction to his vaccination shot.
The following year, the Post repeated the same tactics on the Canadian truckers: Washington Post seeks to dox and shame donors to Canadian freedom protesters.
Of course, some protestors were just fine — they were radical and surprisingly chic!
As with the medical profession, the DNC-MSM ability to turn on a dime from “we all most lockdown to slow the spread to Covid,” to “we all need to be taking it to the streets, maaaan” — and then back again, when it suited their worldview — was yet another nail in their reputational coffin:
Related, from last August: Washington Post “Fact Checker” Was “Completely Wrong” on Wuhan Lab-Leak Headline, He Says.
From that a tweet embedded in that last link, it’s obvious why Noonan feigns having no memory of how the WaPo covered 2020:
Also in Noonan’s article, CTL-F “Biden” “unexpectedly” brings back zero results.
