By John Seymour, a long-time resident of Arlington, Virginia
Times are tough for newspapers. Northwestern University’s School of Journalism recently reported that more than 3,000 newspapers have closed in the past several decades, contributing to a greater than 70% decline in newspaper employment. Advertisers have abandoned legacy media en masse, particularly local and regional newspapers, and have moved their accounts to digital news sites hosted by Google, Yahoo, and Apple. Free news aggregators increasingly appropriate, re-package, and monetize news stories expensively produced by professional journalists.
Even the Washington Post, with its long and storied tradition of exceptional journalism, is vulnerable in today’s competitive and unforgiving media marketplace. The Alliance for Audited Media recently reported that the Post’s average paid daily print circulation had dropped below 100,000 for the first time in generations and has shrunk by more than half in the past 5 years alone. Those figures, for a paper in a metropolitan area with more than 6 million residents and with scores of Pulitzers to its credit, demonstrate — as clearly as any — the crisis in journalism.
Newspapers today simply cannot, for those reasons, afford unforced errors. Yet the current crisis at the Post, involving its Opinion section, is not the result of predatory social media giants poaching stories or the exodus of advertisers to the web. The present turmoil is of its own making. The latest, and most egregious of a cascade of barely believable misjudgments and missteps, was the Post’s recent announcement that the Opinion section would no longer print editorials addressing the full range of political and economic perspectives. Instead, in an e-mail to Post staff, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos announced that the paper will henceforth be writing solely “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets . . . viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Following that announcement, outraged readers of both print and digital editions cancelled their subscriptions in droves.
Now the entire Opinion staff, and perhaps the Post itself, stands at a precipice. The Post has offered employees what amounts to an ultimatum. Opinion staff have until the end of July to advise management of their loyalty and commitment to the Post’s new libertarian creed, or — as then Opinion Editor David Shipley chose to do — quit the paper. In light of Bezos’s starkly worded warning to Shipley that he could remain with the Post only if his response to the new editorial direction was not simply “yes” but “hell yes,” Opinion staff can be under no illusion as to the choice they face. They must either abandon the principle of free inquiry that has defined the Post for generations, or leave the paper for uncertain futures in a shrinking profession.
Readers like me face a similar choice — stick with a long-treasured and trusted source of daily news and commentary or cancel their subscriptions in protest against the paper’s betrayal of the very idea of free expression.
The Post’s Opinion Editors:
Under the leadership of seasoned and highly respected Opinion editors Meg Greenfield and Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post had acquired an enviable reputation for eclectic, prescient, and fearless editorial writing. I arrived in Washington in 1979, the same year Meg Greenfield became Opinion Editor. She edited Opinion and also wrote her own column until very shortly before her death from cancer in 1999. Her work has been widely praised as having influenced the nation’s policy decisions during six Presidential administrations, but is perhaps best known for her honest, open, and non-doctrinaire approach to the critical issues of the day. She modeled herself, she said, on “George Orwell, the incomparable journalist of our century, who followed his inquiries into all the unanticipated, uncomfortable, and illuminating places they led him.”
Jodie Allen, who was one of the senior editors writing unsigned opinions for the Opinion page under Ms. Greenfield, once spoke at a luncheon held at a law firm at which I worked (her husband, George Allen, was a partner there). She spoke with quiet passion about her responsibility as an author of Post opinions,“speaking for the institution.” Her sole metric of success was not the praise of colleagues or readers (the precursors to today’s “time on page,” “discrete views,” and “engaged commenters” metrics) but the judgment of history — whether, when the dust settled, the piece “got it right.” Ms. Allen was proud of her, and her colleagues’ record in that regard, but she also acknowledged the importance of fact-checking, research, intellectual rigor, and importantly, editorial humility in the face of uncertainty. She sought to protect both the reputation of the Post and secure readers’ trust. Readers looked to the Post, then and now, for curated opinions that convey considered and informed judgments — not to tell the reader what to believe, but to state the case honestly, with all its grey areas and fuzziness, and let the reader decide.
In the decades following Meg Greenfield’s death, Fred Hiatt led the Opinion section. Like Ms. Greenfield, Mr. Hiatt too has been lauded for his pursuit of reasoned and balanced debate, neither reflexively progressive nor conservative, but ideologically mixed and deeply committed to the broadest possible democratic dialogue on pressing issues of the day.
Like every other reader of the Post, I suspect, I did not always agree with the positions of the Editorial Board or those of the opinion columnists hired by Ms. Greenfield or Mr. Hiatt, or those of the Post’s freelancers. As a group they endorsed no orthodoxy, or not one, at least, that I could discern. Despite my reservations and sometimes vehement disagreement with the position of the Editorial Board or a columnist, Post editorials often helped me better understand the world views of those I opposed, or even abhorred, and, on occasion, even rethink my own jealously held prior point of view.
I have been, for many decades now, a subscriber to the Post and a devoted reader of Opinion Op-Eds, letters, and columns. One experiment by the Post, however, allowed me to be a contributor as well. Under Hiatt, the Opinion section placed a tiny notice inviting readers to contribute to something it called “Local Opinions” — a stand-alone page in the Sunday Metro section devoted to Op-Eds and short columns submitted by residents of Virginia, Maryland, and the District. I was surprised by the Post’s invitation and gratified by its faith in readers. Most local residents are not, after all, opinion leaders, professional pundits, policymakers, or public intellectuals. They are simply area inhabitants and consumers of the Post who, the paper apparently believed, might nevertheless know something about the place in which they lived that could inform public debates and promote a dialogue of interest to the readership as a whole.
Local issues were not, as Ms. Greenfield once acknowledged, typical fodder for Opinion. In her memoir, Washington, she confessed her own lack of curiosity about the actual, physical Washington — the District of Columbia and the Virginia and Maryland suburbs. Ms. Greenfield’s Washington was the small group of people who ruled or influenced the national seat of government. They were the preternaturally grown-up and accomplished good children — “not the ones who put the cat in the dryer, but the ones who tattled,” as she put it— and who now occupied positions of power. Hiatt, however, seemed to believe that even the cat tossers might have opinions and stories to tell.
For the 5 or so years of the tenure of Local Opinions, I was one of many local residents who regularly submitted Op-Eds addressing such parochial, but to us pressing, issues of school crowding and quality, housing affordability, commuting pressures, over-development, municipal efforts to reduce homelessness and promote environmental sustainability, among many others. The feature helped, I liked to think, to enhance the trust between the media company and its local customer base to the betterment of both.
Fred Hiatt died of a heart attack in late 2021 and his successor, until very recently, was David Shipley, who was hired by Will Lewis, the Post’s chief executive officer, from Bloomberg Opinion. Eventually, and consistent with the Post’s continued and frankly admitted deemphasis on local news generally, the Post decided to cancel Local Opinions. (Only days ago, the paper’s shrinkage of local coverage was further evidenced in the Post’s discontinuance of the diminutive, but still separate Metro section, by bundling it with Style and Sports). Despite the undeniable and rapid decline in the Post’s interest in local news, Mr. Shipley nevertheless entertained a plea by some regular contributors (including me) to resurrect the feature.
Our arguments about the importance of local news and opinion in strengthening civic trust, presented to Mr. Shipley in a conference room dedicated to Meg Greenfield, did not persuade him. He was, however, unfailingly polite and open about the future of Opinion. He expressed his own (and the Post’s) commitment to a broader and more national focus in selecting materials for Opinion. He also provided brief guidance on the type of Op-Eds he prized — voices that “sung” and “surprised”— and went on to suggest that the best opinion writing in the media today was found in The Atlantic.
I remember agreeing with that judgment and wanting to ask him, though thinking it impolite, why Anne Appelbaum, the Post’s long-time columnist on foreign affairs (particularly Eastern Europe), had decamped to The Atlantic. (Many other Post reporters have since left for The Atlantic). Reading Appelbaum’s columns was, to me, like finding a miner’s lamp while lost in catacombs beneath Prague. She explained the historically-fraught machinations and intrigues of political antagonists in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and other nations, and their implications for the future of democracy world-wide, with deep understanding and in exceptionally clear prose.
A few weeks ago, the Post announced its appointment of Adam O’Neal to replace Mr. Shipley. Mr. O’Neal has worked at the Wall Street Journal as an editorial writer and apparently was able to give Bezos the “hell yes!” he demanded where Mr. Shipley could not. The Journal’s editorial stance, memorialized in a banner on its own Opinion page, has always been frank about its bias and mirrors the one recently embraced by the Post, using virtually identical language — “free markets, free people.” Will Lewis heralded O’Neal’s selection as part of the Post’s commitment to promote “the timeless American values that have driven entrepreneurialism, innovation, and freedom across the country since its inception.”
In just a few short weeks, Opinion staff will need to determine whether, particularly in light of the tumult of the past few months, they share Mr. Lewis’s and Mr. O’Neal’s vision and can thrive as journalists in a paper that views American “timeless” values through such a narrow lens.
First Unforced Error: The Post’s Decision Not to Endorse Kamala Harris for President.
Late in the most consequential Presidential election of my lifetime (and I speak as one who voted, in his very first election, for Democrat Hubert Humphrey over Republican Richard Nixon), Jeff Bezos rejected the advice of both his Opinion staff and the Editorial Board and spiked a draft editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for President. He did so less than two weeks before the election, maintaining that Presidential endorsements create the “appearance of bias” and further weaken citizens’ trust in the news media. Mr. Lewis endorsed the non-endorsement and praised it as a “return to our roots of non-endorsing presidential candidates.” The outcry from readers was instant and heated. More than 200,000 subscribers are said to have cancelled their subscriptions in protest.
Critics of the decision were legion. In an analysis of the Post’s history of Presidential endorsements in the Columbia Journalism Review, long-time Post journalist Steven Mufson showed that, for the past 50 years or so, the Post’s “endorsing a candidate for President had become so common that not endorsing one became a political statement of its own.” Indeed, Bezos had let a decade and two presidential campaigns pass without objecting to the Editorial Board’s endorsements. The Post had endorsed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the last two Presidential contests with the blessing of Bezos.
Former Executive Editor Martin Baron, in a post on X, condemned the action as “disturbing spinelessness in an institution famed for courage.” David Hoffman, a 40-year veteran of the Post, had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing only days before for the series “Annals of Autocracy,” warning of the danger rising authoritarianism was presenting to democracy world-wide. He resigned from the Post’s Editorial Board in protest. Hoffman was joined by nearly a third of the Editorial Board. He found it “unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.” Twenty-one Post columnists also publicly charged the paper’s refusal to endorse Harris with “abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the paper that we all love.”
In ordinary times, when the Post reported on itself, the Bezos decision would have been subject to the same deep probing and skeptical questioning Post journalists practice every day when challenging the flimsy and self-serving declarations of the nation’s PR flacks, Congressional aides, and Deputy Assistant Secretaries. But these are not ordinary times and the Post news side no longer covers the paper. Instead, it was left up to the Post’s writer of satire, Alexandra Petri, to pen a column endorsing Harris and holding the Post’s “return to our roots” justification up to ridicule. She expressed her embarrassment that it had “fallen to her, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement” but that she is endorsing Harris “because I like elections and want to keep having them.” She also observed that democracy was fragile and, in a caution to the Post itself, warned that “trust is like that too, as newspapers know.”
She recognized, as so many readers did, that it’s not political endorsements that weaken trust in the media but rather the corporate actions of media owners that sacrifice the public interest for personal profit.
Second Unforced Error: The Post’s Decision Not to Print Ann Telnaes’s Cartoon:
During the run-up to President Trump’s second inauguration and its aftermath, the public witnessed a deeply embarrassing display of sycophancy by powerful men, apparently terrified of Trump and his well-earned reputation for retribution and personal malice. Pulitzer-Prize winning Post editorial cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, captured their cowardice in a cartoon depicting a group of corporate titans and media chief executives (together with a prostrate Mickey Mouse) honoring a towering statue of a deity — Donald Trump. One of those showing fealty and kneeling before Trump with a bag of money was Jeff Bezos, who had recently accepted an invitation to visit Trump in Mar-a-Lago, pledged a huge sum for Trump’s inauguration, and publicly congratulated Trump on his election victory. The cartoon was subsequently spiked by David Shipley, then Editor of Opinions.
Ms. Telnaes promptly resigned from the Post, saying that never in her 17 years as a Post cartoonist had the Post declined to publish a cartoon because of what she aimed her pen at. She insisted that, in working for Opinion, whether as a writer or cartoonist, her job was to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. To do that, she and other staff must “have to have the freedom to say what we want to say.”
Shortly after her resignation, Telnaes received another Pulitzer Prize. In making its award, the Pulitzer Committee praised her for delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness and creativity and, apparently unable to resist a dig at the Post, also praised her “fearlessness that led to her departure from [the paper].”
Telnaes’s Pulitzer Prize was only the most recent of her many national awards. She received the Herblock prize in 2023, awarded for work exemplifying the “courageous independent standard” set by the famed long-time Washington Post cartoonist, Herblock. Herblock’s repeated skewering of Joseph McCarthy, during which Herblock coined the term “McCarthyism,” remains among the most revered series of political cartoons in American journalism and helped to solidify the Post’s reputation for fearless and independent thought.
David Shipley explained the cancellation by saying that the decision had nothing to do with politics, but was simply a run-of-the-mill editorial judgment — a desire to avoid repetition because the cartoon reprised a theme already captured in an earlier column and one to be printed in the near future. This rationale, like the rationale asserted for the Bezos’ non-endorsement decision (to which Shipley objected), was also received by readers with skepticism and yet another slew of subscription cancellations.
Game, Set, and Match: The Post’s Decision to Embrace Censorship
The Post’s Non-Endorsement decision and decision to spike a superb satirical cartoon sharply critical of the Post’s owner might, charitably, be considered serious errors of judgment, though not a fatal forfeiture of the Post’s integrity and credibility with readers. In late February, however, Mr. Bezos announced a decision that, to many Post employees and countless readers, significantly and perhaps irrevocably damaged the paper’s reputation for unbiased open-minded journalism. Bezos’s decision to publish only editorials that served as paeans to personal liberty and capitalism was viewed, by many, to turn the slogan of the Opinion page, “An Independent Newspaper,” on its head. The paper is much diminished as a result and looks weak — as though the owner is aware that he can’t win the battle of ideas in a fair fight but must disqualify its opponents on a technicality.
Ruth Marcus, a Post columnist and deputy to Fred Hiatt, resigned after 40 years with the paper when Mr. Lewis killed a column she had penned critical of the edict. In her draft column, subsequently published in The New Yorker, Ms. Marcus expressed her fierce love for the paper, her concern about a growing timidity in the paper’s coverage of Trump following Hiatt’s death, and her outrage that the Post, long deemed a champion of the First Amendment, had decided to practice censorship. Readers deserve and expect the Post’s “best judgment on any particular issue,” she said, yet Bezos’s decision strips away that assurance because he won’t publish views that contradict his own leaning.
Fearing a collapse in reader trust, she warned that “It is asking a lot of readers not to suspect that Bezos’s personal business interests play no role here.”
So Where Does All This Leave the Post? — With a Huge Deficit of Reader Trust
Former Executive Editor Martin Baron, when queried about potential threats to the Post’s independence following Bezos’s acquisition said “the reader will hold any owner accountable because the heart of the brand ‘The Washington Post’ is precisely its independence and journalistic integrity.”
And readers are doing exactly that, using the only means available to them — cancelling their subscriptions. Both print and digital subscriptions have plummeted sharply. At the same time it is shedding subscribers, the Post is losing talent. Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and 45-year veteran of the Post, left the paper following Bezos’s censoring of Opinion. His farewell piece was a tribute to Katharine Graham, the Post’s prior owner who, Robinson wrote, “bowed to no President.”
The Post recently lost both Alexandra Petri, America’s gimlet-eyed political satirist and Ann Telnaes, America’s most talented political cartoonist. At a time when the Post is hemorraging subscribers and struggling to attract younger readers, it beggars belief that the newsroom is no longer considered a hospitable setting for such gifted journalists. Following her resignation from Opinion, Ruth Marcus has contributed regularly to the New Yorker, and other distinguished Post reporters, columnists, and members of the Editorial Board have moved elsewhere to ply their trade— many to The Atlantic, and others to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
Despite the travails of Opinion, Post news staff still break important national and international stories, publish superb long-form investigative pieces that illuminate neglected and forgotten corners of American life, and continue to win journalism prizes and acclaim from colleagues and competitors. And the Post still has a solid cadre of Opinion columnists such as Dana Milbank, Monica Hesse, and Marc Fisher. They will, I’m convinced, push, probe, and poke the space left between Bezos’s two ideological boundary stones with grace and wit, and with their moral compasses intact and working, whatever memos they might receive from management.
Increasingly, though, I look elsewhere in the Post for informed, eloquent, brave, and passionate opinions. The sports columnist Sally Jenkins finds in athletics the same battles for racial and gender equality and respect that have been fought in all of America’s workplaces for generations. Candace Buckner has reported on the the fear infecting the sports world following Trump’s election, causing athletes to abandon social activism. Kevin Blackistone’s essay on the firing of a women’s basketball coach at a tiny college in Kansas as part of Trump’s “maelstrom of malefaction metastasizing across the country” humanized the DOGE threat to countless lives and livelihoods.
The Arts section is another source of stealth opinions. Ron Charles’s fiction reviews explore the moral and ethical dilemmas posed in newly published works, and explain their relevance today. Becca Rothfeld’s terrifically erudite bits of cultural criticism in her non-fiction book reviews display her often understated, but nevertheless firmly held, commitment to political and social egalitarianism. Art critics Philip Kennicott and Sebastian See are unstinting in their efforts to warn the public of the threat Trump’s alarmingly celebratory and myopic view of American exceptionalism poses to the the nation’s art, history and cultural institutions, and ultimately to civil society itself. Michelle Singletary’s columns on money and economics help countless struggling readers learn to duck and weave when the “invisible hand” hand of Bezos’s revered free market throws a right hook.
It is these voices that, despite the growing senescence of Opinion and Bezos’s eager hastening of its demise, cause me still to listen eagerly for the plop of the Post on the lawn each morning at 5:30 a.m.
