Over the past 3 years, The Washington Post has lost half its audience (!!!!), and last year alone the so-called "newspaper" lost $77 million. 

An observer might look at those facts and conclude that, perhaps, unless things change the publication will cease to be a going concern. You would think that the reporters, needing their paychecks and with few places to land in a contracting media environment, would want to help keep the place alive.

You would be wrong. Not because they don't care or even that they are stupid. It's that they are as blind to reality when thinking about their own jobs and futures as they are about how the rest of the world works. They have other concerns, and reality doesn't interest them. 

I'd argue the worst sign for WaPo is that they've lost *half* their audience since 2020 and *$77 million* last year.... and the fact that they have someone trying to get them out of that rut who isn't overly sensitive to their anxieties (or to P.R.-approved diction) is a net win https://t.co/2ken5zYE9X

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) June 3, 2024

As I wrote yesterday, the Post has fired its editor Sally Buzbee and is hiring a new team to right the ship—if righting the ship is even possible.  The publisher met with the newsroom and was quite blunt about why the former editor departed and announced the changes he was making. 

"Reporters" didn't like the changes."

When Washington Post publisher Will Lewis and new interim executive editor Matt Murray met with staff Monday, the newsroom was still coming to terms with the abrupt exit of Sally Buzbee, who had led the paper since May 2021.

“Everyone was pretty shocked with your email last night,” one reporter said at the meeting, according to a source present. The reporter suggested that “the most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post, and we now have four white men running three newsrooms,” and expressed surprise at this development given Lewis’s prior commitments to diversity.

"Four white men." "Two of your buddies." Compared to diversity, the continued viability of the paper in a tough economic environment and a fleeing readership base was small beer. That belief was  not restricted to this one reporter--the applause line came from another on the same subject:

Later in the meeting, another reporter asked Lewis whether “any women or people of color were interviewed and seriously considered for either of these positions,” a question that prompted applause.

Buzbee, you see, was the first female editor of the Post, and like Kamala Harris too valuable as a symbol to have mere competence be a determining factor evaluating the job she was doing. 

Did I mention that the Post is bleeding money and losing audience faster than the movie "Cats? did"

At one point Lewis was asked whether he was intentionally bringing in people who come from a different culture than the Post. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” Lewis said. “So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

Is Lewis bringing in people who won't follow the losing strategy that got the Post where it is? You bet your ass he is, and that pisses off the newsroom. Better to die a glorious death, charging the DEI hill than to change strategies with White men in charge. 

Readers of this site are well aware of the reason why the Post is struggling: it has become a trash publication more concerned with pursuing a political agenda than reporting facts and more dedicated to DEI and alphabet ideology than retaining readers who are looking for smart reporting and analysis. 

The newsroom is filled with people who have no interest in reality. Not even a little.

One of the cruder terms I often use is "mental masturbation" because it so aptly describes people whose thought process amounts to stroking their intellectual and emotional erogenous zones. People like Philip Bump and Taylor Lorenz, whose every utterance is the mental equivalent of a caress to their nether regions. 

Jonathan Turley, who used to write for the Post regularly, described his own experience:

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.

Philip Bump, for those of you blessed to have never read him, hates Trump so much that he is willing to spread any lie, spew any absurd accusation, and praise any Democrat who opposes Trump. 

After the most recent purge of the newsroom to get spending under control, it was notable that the worst columnists remained. Most notably, Taylor Lorenz, whom we can all agree is deranged, remained despite the editor having a golden opportunity to dump one of the most embarrassing writers they have ever employed. 

The Post quit being interested in something as prosaic as news long ago. Its reporters would fit comfortably at Pravda. 

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.

Stroking Democrats and whipping Republicans in the newspaper was the intellectual equivalent of a Pride parade for these guys. They get a thrill from their Queer relationship to the truth and the public, flaunting their preferences and demanding we embrace their...idiosyncratic...ways. 

The reality is that their "journalism" is to reporting as autoerotic asphyxiation is to onanism. It is flirting with death in the pursuit of a pleasure that only matters to themselves. 

Will Lewis is staging an intervention. 

Will it work? Interventions often do and often don't. We will have to see how this one goes.