It would appear that the hacks at The Washington Post (WaPo) are experiencing quite the post-Trump lull. And who better to gloat about it than their competitors to the north?
In the years after Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, business boomed. Droves of readers bought digital subscriptions, and the newsroom roughly doubled in size, adding hundreds more journalists.
But The Post’s business has stalled in the past year. As the breakneck news pace of the Trump administration faded away, readers have turned elsewhere, and the paper’s push to expand beyond Beltway coverage hasn’t compensated for the loss.
The organization is on track to lose money in 2022, after years of profitability, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s finances.
What struck me about this article was the amount of effort that the Times put into writing about the misfortunes of a rival. The authors do toss a little perfunctory “propagandists in arms” praise WaPo’s way, writing that its newsroom “remains one of the most formidable in the country.” They’re then quick to point out that, while WaPo has been losing readers post-Trump, the Times and The Wall Street Journal have been adding them.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a gloat-fest.
The article also notes that WaPo received a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the J6 events, and that probably explains a lot of what’s going on. The Washington Post is supposed to be the newspaper of record in the capital of the most powerful nation on Earth. More than any other news organization in the United States, WaPo really shouldn’t be picking sides.
Not only does it pick sides, but it also conducts its business like a cheap tabloid. You know, the kind you used to find in grocery store checkout lines. Rather than try to distinguish itself from the knee-jerk bias of the Times, WaPo publishes drivel that is a cheap knockoff of The Gray Lady. If WaPo truly is trying to expand its appeal beyond the Beltway, its editors are going to have to come to grips with just how little people in real America care about all of the navel-gazing in Washington.
Joe and Jane America in flyover country don’t think that January 6, 2021, was a defining moment in American history, nor do they think that the kangaroo court the day spawned is must-see TV. They’re too busy trying to figure out how to pay for the groceries and the gas that they could easily afford when Trump was president.
Like CNN, WaPo is discovering that Donald Trump really is their daddy and they probably all would secretly admit to missing him at this point. It really is a classic “be careful what you wish for” scenario.
Americans are faced with far too much harsh reality right now to buy into WaPo‘s false narratives that are driven by the daddy issues that its writers and editors have with Donald Trump.
According to the Times article, WaPo still has some grand plans to “broaden coverage” that will eventually right the financial ship.
Maybe they should Google “journalism” and give that a try.
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