The (Washington) Post Truth Era
Next come the thought police
***I shared this yesterday at Substack, which I am migrating away from to come back here. I felt it made a good return to Medium post.***
I spend roughly an hour every evening catching up on the news. My habit typically involves letting the news apps I follow give me push notifications throughout the day, which I do not swipe away and just let pile up. Then, when the day is done and I have time to unwind, I look through the notifications and try to focus on just one topic from all of that mess, which is not as hard as it sounds. There tend to be themes and trends that make the headlines at a higher rate than others. Plus, I’ll leave to read editorial-type articles expanding on something I had read about the previous day.
Somewhere in the mix of stories yesterday, though, I missed the latest controversy at The Washington Post; namely, Jeff Bezos taking control of the editorial page and shifting it to focus exclusively on pieces that promote “personal liberties and free markets”. He reasons that there just is not enough of this type of thing out there. This move prompted David Shipley, the former editorial editor, to resign (or he was forced out, depending on who is telling the story). In fact, none of my push notifications mentioned it. Neither did the AM or PM newsletters I read. I did not really hear about this until this morning. I did see some rumbling about it on Mastodon and Bluesky yesterday, but it was a comment here and there and it did not register in my mind as anything worth looking at. Especially since bashing Legacy Media is a favorite pastime on Social Media these days.
So this morning, I was reading my morning rundown of top stories and came across one about how Jeff Bezos came to be rather chummy with our current President. The story mentioned the shakeup at the editorial page, which I had a hint of there being something amiss, so I looked into it a little more.
This should be treated as a much bigger story than it is currently.
The American right, and MAGA particularly, has been adamantly opposed to the Legacy Media for a long time. The Trump era has brought out this sentiment most clearly. This is not a feature of just the right, though. The American left has begun to speak out against the Legacy Media as well. The right hates it because it is willing, sometimes, to be critical of Trump. The left hates it because they see it as not critical enough. The left tends to accuse them of failing us and being complicit in Trump’s shenanigans by their seeming silence.
To be honest, the old stalwarts of, what was once called, the Mainstream Media have grown stale. Their propensity to keep doing things the way they always have despite the rapidly changing landscape of how people consume news, and media in general, has led them to near irrelevance. The advent of 280-character tweets and short-form video do not lend themselves well to long-form investigative journalism. Coupled with their seeming fear of speaking truth to power, as all good journalism should, they have made themselves a kind of pariah. On top of that, good journalists have left in droves, or been fired in the name of cutting costs to keep the newspapers solvent.
24-hour cable news is not fairing much better in the internet era.
Credit where credit is due, though. The right has done a much better job of finding a niche in the digital age.
But I digress.
The problem with Bezos commandeering the direction of the editorial page, besides likely being a poor business decision for the Post and a bad look for Legacy Media in a time of great hostility towards it, is that there is a large segment of the United States population who still trust the Big Names in the business to keep them informed. The Post still has over 2 million subscribers. Just ahead of them are the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which have over 11 million and over 4 million subscribers respectively. People do not typically subscribe to something if they do not like it, especially now with the myriad choices we have ranging from individual writers on Substack to Patreon and even cable TV news network premium apps.
Despite all the ranting and raving, a whole lot of people still trust Legacy Media.
So when Bezos takes charge of the editorial section in this way, he is also taking charge of the way his subscribers view the world because, as Michael Schaffer points out in this piece at Politico, “the general public has a hard time understanding the journalism-school distinction between opinion and news.”
When the news was losing their minds over Biden’s poor debate performance last year, it was not the factual accounting of what went right or wrong on the stage that made movement on social media. It was comments about Biden’s fitness to run a campaign or run the country. It was viral videos by TikTok influencers talking about their personal experiences with dementia. It was opinion, which people then talked about as though it were fact. In a post-truth world, controlling not only the stories that people see but also how they think of the stories becomes vitally important. I think Jeff Bezos understands this, and given his newfound closeness with the President, he also understands that his own fortune could be at risk. So it becomes important for the newsroom that he owns be cordial with the current administration.
It matters precious little if the reporting at the Post continues to be the same as it has been because the chances of a low-information voter reading it are slim. They’re going to read the headline and move on with their day. They are likely even to forget what they read. Editorial headlines, by contrast, are more sticky. They have feeling. Titles like “Finally, the Supreme Court can help a California family get back art stolen by Nazis” or “How Medicaid and Medicare Cuts Will Hurt Everyone’s Health Care” pack more punch than “Chief justice halts lower court decision ordering Trump administration to pay State Department, USAID contractors” or “Senate Republicans voice DOGE concerns in meeting with White House chief of staff”.
At least before, the editorial page at the Post, even though it had an obvious lean, would pay lip service to differing viewpoints. This at least gave readers a fighting chance of reaching their own opinion about what is going on in the world. But, when you give people only one choice, their thinking is molded in that direction.
In light of Trump’s commandeering of control of the White House press pool, Bezos’ move sets a dangerous precedent. It is eerily reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command…And if all others accepted the lie…If all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.”
During the first Trump presidency, we heard repeated attacks on the media as “Fake News” whenever they said something critical of what he was doing. The attacks have become more brazen this time around. We have all heard the story of how the AP was banned from the Oval Office over their decision not to refer to The Gulf of Mexico exclusively as The Gulf of America. But only a week or two before this, Politico lost their seats to make room for more Trump-friendly publications. They also lost their spot in the Pentagon under a new policy of a rotating press pool there. One has to wonder if the White House is going to allow, when they choose who gets to report on the President’s comings and goings, an outlet to join them that is known for being critical. Given Trump’s insistence, which we learned about during his first go at this, of only reading stories that say good things about him, I think we can reasonably come to the answer.
If all records tell the same story…
