Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis is being denounced this week after the end of the short-lived tenure of Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and delivering a truth bomb to the staff. Lewis told them that they have lost their audience and “people are not reading your stuff.” It was a shot of reality in the echo chambered news outlet and the response was predictable. However, Lewis just might save this venerable newspaper if he follows his frank talk with meaningful reforms to bring balance back to the Post.
As someone who once wrote for the Washington Post regularly, I have long lamented the decline of the paper following a pronounced shift toward partisan and advocacy journalism. There was a time when the Post valued diversity of thought and steadfastly demanded staff write not as advocates but reporters. That began to change rapidly in the first Trump term.
Suddenly, I found editors would slow walk copy, contest every line of your column, and make unfounded claims. In the meantime, they were increasingly running unsupported legal columns and even false statements from authors on the left. When confronted about columnists with demonstrably false statements, the Post simply shrugged.
One of the most striking examples was after its columnist Philip Bump had a meltdown in an interview when confronted over past false claims. After I wrote a column about the litany of such false claims, the Post surprised many of us by issuing a statement that they stood by all of Bump’s reporting, including false columns on the Lafayette Park protests, Hunter Biden laptop and other stories. That was long after other media debunked the claims, but the Post stood by the false reporting.
The decline of the Post has followed a familiar pattern. The editors and reporters simply wrote off half of their audience and became a publication for largely liberal and Democratic readers. In these difficult economic times with limited revenue sources, it is a lethal decision. Yet, for editors and reporters, it is still professionally beneficial to embrace advocacy journalism even if it is reducing the readership of your own newspaper.
Lewis, a British media executive who joined the Post earlier this year, reportedly got into a “heated exchange” with a staffer. Lewis explained that, while reporters were protesting measures to expand readership, the very survival of the paper was now at stake:
“We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around,” Lewis said. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Other staffers could not get beyond the gender and race of those who would be overseeing them. One staffer complained “we now have four White men running three newsrooms.”
The Post has been buying out staff to avoid mass layoffs, but reporters are up in arms over the effort to turn the newspaper around.
The question is whether, after years of creating a culture of advocacy journalism and woke reporting, the Post is still capable of reaching a larger audience. If you want to read about certain stories, you are not likely to go to the Post, NPR or other outlets.
Likewise, with reporters referring to the January 6th riot as an “insurrection,” there is little doubt for the reader that the coverage is a form of advocacy. Again, such stories can affirm the bona fides for reporters, but they also affirm the bias for readers.
I truly do hope that the Washington Post can recover. The newspaper has played a critical role in our history and a towering example of journalism at its very best from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate. If you want people to “read your stuff,” you need to return to being reporters and not advocates; you need to start reaching an audience larger than yourself and your friends.
As I previously wrote, the mantra “Let’s Go Brandon!” was embraced by millions as a criticism as much of the media as President Biden. It derives from an Oct. 2 interview with race-car driver Brandon Brown after he won his first NASCAR Xfinity Series race. During the interview, NBC reporter Kelli Stavast’s questions were drowned out by loud-and-clear chants of “F*** Joe Biden.” Stavast quickly and inexplicably declared, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go, Brandon!’”
Stavast’s denial or misinterpretation of the obvious instantly became a symbol of what many Americans perceive as media bias in favor of the Biden administration. Indeed, some in the media immediately praised Stavast for her “smooth save” and being a “quick-thinking reporter.” The media’s reaction has fulfilled the underlying narrative, too, with commentators growing increasingly shrill in denouncing its use. NPR denounced the chant as “vulgar,” while writers at the Washington Post and other newspapers condemned it as offensive; CNN’s John Avalon called it “not patriotic,” while CNN political analyst Joe Lockhart compared it to coded rhetoric from Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and ISIS.
The more the media has cried foul, however, the more people picked up the chant.
It was the public response to how many in the media have embraced advocacy journalism and rejected objectivity in reporting; in their view, readers and viewers are now to be educated rather than merely informed. That included the rejection of “both-sidesism,” the need to offer a balanced account of the news.
Many of us hope that Lewis will rescue the Post from itself in the coming months. It will not be easy after years of orthodoxy and advocacy in the ranks. Yet, the Washington Post is a national treasure worth fighting for. People are still longing for old-fashioned, reliable news. As with the Field of Dreams, if you re-build it, “they will come” back to the Post.
I doubt the WaPo can be saved. The existing propaganda staff will have to be gone and replaced. The problem is most if not all replacement come out of Universities that have taught them in woke journalism and not truth, which people are looking for. MSM in all forms are dying because they have given up on truth for propaganda and people are looking for truth.
Without the Washington Compost how will bird owners line their birdcages, people wrap 3 day old fish, or line litter boxes?
f the wapo… fake news forever……………….
Jonathan, Great piece. The only way Lewis will be able to turn around the Post is by firing 90% of the current employees. Unfortunately, these employees have been thoroughly indoctrinated into the leftist cult ideology. The de-programming process that would be necessary to bring about a modicum of rationality is impractical and not worth the time and money for a quick turnaround. Hiring an 80/20 ratio of conservative to liberal educated reporters might save this titanic from foundering. Otherwise, let the conflagration and the lowering of life rafts begin.
There are far more “Beyond Journalists” today than there are journalists. Like “Beyond Meat,” they are loudly pretending to be something they are not. And the public isn’t buying it.
Whether it’s “Beyond Journalists” (very clever) or Jonathan’s “Advocacy Journalism”, it’s a misnomer. The Post reporters over the past decade do not deserve to be labeled “journalists” at all. “Advocacy Journalism” is an oxymoronic. By definition, if you’re a journalist, you do not advocate. Johnathan’s insight into the motives of Post writers being at odds with their publisher’s need to sell papers sounds plausible; however, I suspect rank laziness on the part of a whole generation of Post employees is more to blame. Most so-called journalists socialize and network and then sit on their asses and wait for calls or emails with “news” from their contacts. They’re too lazy to care why or what their sources’ agendas may be, they just want to throw some copy together and get to happy hour.
I’d like to see a return of journalism rather than just reporting. The problem is they just ‘report’ what they are told by partisan insiders (often Intel Community dis/misinformation) rather than actually investigating in any depth in search of the truth. 51 of these sources assured them the lap top entered into evidence was fake. What is fake is their credibility.
The City News Bureau in Chicago was at one time considered the basic training camp for newly minted reporters. There was a sign hanging over the entrance to their newsroom: “If your mother tells you she loves you……check it out!” 😊
What payoff did they receive for lying about the laptop. No need to sign a NDA – “I don’t recall Senator”. Same thing except no one wrote a check. I’m waiting for their indictments.
Such great irony that the staffer complaining of a white male replacing a white female who oversaw the loss of half their audience and colleagues. Lewis should have thanked the staffer for illustrating his point. Go woke, go broke.
I don’t think they are that important to save, nor have they been particularly towering if you look at their history honestly. For the most part The Washington Post have been for decades not much more than a leak outlet for the US deep state.
turley is high af, asshat thinks trumps charges cant be overturned on appeal, he LIES.
You need help , please stop sniffing the glue bro.
Fred’s commitment to willful ignorance is impressive.
Fred’s commitment to ignorance is impressive.
Thanks for that, derf, ya fvcking nephew cornholing, booger eating, 3rd stage syphilis infected freak
Sooo what do you really think about him? 🙂
Turley is good but he needs to stop voting Democrat. He part of the problem.
Keep drinking the KoolAid.
TURLEY did not say that.
YUP…. My introduction to the Post happened one day when they featured a burning truck, with the dead driver burning to death. My neighbor back in Indiana!
I agree. Watergate was really not a story of brave, heroic reporters from All The President’s Men. It was a story of the deep state using two gullible Post reporters to advance a personal vendetta.
Amen ! The WP, NYT, Boston Globe and so many other media outlets have slit their own wrists. So be it — die already. The world won’t miss any of them. In some ways one could make the argument that they are worse than the Covid virus. They’ve become obsolete and irrelevant because most of what is published is grossly fabricated and lacks any sense of reality or morality.
The Washington Times and New York Post will survive and the New York Times and Washington Post need to simply be put down to end their misery.
Let them LEARN TO DIG COAL, SOMETHING USEFUL!
I hope it fails, that everyone there loses their jobs, and that Jeff Bezos loses his investment and is humiliated for being a tool of leftist nitwits.
You couldn’t reform this fake news deep state propaganda organization even if you put all of the leftist Marxists employed by the Post into their own form of communist re-education camps. These toxic writers won’t change what they think or write just to please a new editor in chief. Burn baby Burn!
What is a “washington post”?
I think it is one of a number of hitching posts that George Washingto used for tieing his horse.