Last week's layoffs at the Washington Post were sort of a social Rorschach Blob. Liberals saw it as part of the collapse of (their version of) democracy. Paleocons saw the invisible hand of the market stuffing newspapers into the birdcage. Journalists saw the greatest crisis since the deaths of journalists in World War 2.
Peggy Noonan saw grounds for sadness:
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.
She's right, at least conceptually. Democracy depends on institutions, and on being able to trust those institutions.
The always estimable Mary Katherine Ham had an excellent rejoinder:
The moment was Covid. It happened. Almost every journalist in the nation failed to relay reliable information, instead succumbing to panic and the widest-spread daily curtailment of civil liberties in my lifetime. The rare figures who didn't were silenced or stifled or removed. https://t.co/JdaIVgUWgu
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) February 6, 2026
The Hammer's not wrong.
But to see where the WaPo's rot became terminal, I think you have to go back a few more years, to December 1, 2016. It was the immediate aftermath of Trump's election - an election that most of Big Left had congratulated itself on winning even while polls were still open (one prog friend of mine wrote at 9 AM: "The question isn't whether the election goes blue, but just how blue"). The shock and horror were palpable.
And just shy of a month later, the program came out with a one-hour episode, featuring execs from all the inside-the-beltway newsrooms, on the need to:
- change the rules of civility in covering Trump
- change the language to deal with Trump (featuring George Lakoff, a Noam Chomsky acolyte who has picked up Chomsky's work of doing for language what Howard Zinn did for history)
- treat talking about Trump as a sort of pathology to be headed off and treated
- most damningly, the need to change the rules of journalism - from the whole "telling people the facts and letting them make up their own minds" to "denormalizing Trump".
It's not like the decision to abandon the traditional norms and ethics of journalism took place that day on that show - it clearly goes back years - but it was here that it became pretty much irreparable.
So I come not to praise, or even bury, the WaPo. Merely to celebrate its humbling.
