Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis is being denounced this week after the end of the short-lived tenure of Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and delivering a truth bomb to the staff. Lewis told them that they have lost their audience and “people are not reading your stuff.” It was a shot of reality in the echo chambered news outlet and the response was predictable. However, Lewis just might save this venerable newspaper if he follows his frank talk with meaningful reforms to bring balance back to the Post.
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.
The decline of the Post has followed a familiar pattern. The editors and reporters simply wrote off half of their audience and became a publication for largely liberal and Democratic readers. In these difficult economic times with limited revenue sources, it is a lethal decision. Yet, for editors and reporters, it is still professionally beneficial to embrace advocacy journalism even if it is reducing the readership of your own newspaper.
Lewis, a British media executive who joined the Post earlier this year, reportedly got into a “heated exchange” with a staffer. Lewis explained that, while reporters were protesting measures to expand readership, the very survival of the paper was now at stake:
“We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around,” Lewis said. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Other staffers could not get beyond the gender and race of those who would be overseeing them. One staffer complained “we now have four White men running three newsrooms.”
The Post has been buying out staff to avoid mass layoffs, but reporters are up in arms over the effort to turn the newspaper around.
The question is whether, after years of creating a culture of advocacy journalism and woke reporting, the Post is still capable of reaching a larger audience. If you want to read about certain stories, you are not likely to go to the Post, NPR or other outlets.
Likewise, with reporters referring to the January 6th riot as an “insurrection,” there is little doubt for the reader that the coverage is a form of advocacy. Again, such stories can affirm the bona fides for reporters, but they also affirm the bias for readers.
I truly do hope that the Washington Post can recover. The newspaper has played a critical role in our history and a towering example of journalism at its very best from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate. If you want people to “read your stuff,” you need to return to being reporters and not advocates; you need to start reaching an audience larger than yourself and your friends.
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.
Many of us hope that Lewis will rescue the Post from itself in the coming months. It will not be easy after years of orthodoxy and advocacy in the ranks. Yet, the Washington Post is a national treasure worth fighting for. People are still longing for old-fashioned, reliable news. As with the Field of Dreams, if you re-build it, “they will come” back to the Post.
If they want to regain readers they should start with a forthright apology for the lies and obfuscations they have made over the last 8 years. Start with admitting that there is fire under all that smoke of the Biden family corruption and there always has been. Make an accurate recital of the Russia hoax and the covid coverup.
Do this and they might have a shot. Without it they just prolong the agony of their demise as an actual news outlet. Sinners must repent first to be forgiven!
No mention of correlation of Washington Post’s bias with its acquisition by Bezos? I believe it worthy of note.
The Bezos observation is a good one. It is worthy of note. Also worthy of note is the objectivity of Turley. As an attorney he recognizes the value of objectivity and the value of being able to prove the evidence presented, the probative value of the presented fact. He interpreted the January 6th event as a riot, correctly at the expense of disappointing the petulant like responses of some.. He is referred to as both conservative and liberal, which is telling. I have heard his legal analysis in seminars and his interpretation of the constitution is accurate. ( Be sure to view the presentation on the legality of pardons). Balance is not the result of political influence but rather of objectivity and the recognition of the probative value of the presented facts.
Yeah, good luck changing it. Personally, I would love to see it go belly up. Maybe it would send a signal to the rest of the liberal rags masquerading as “newspapers” across the country.
My Army Drill Sergeant taught boot camp trainees:
Never assume anything, never say your sorry & always remember that shit stinks.
“Let’s Not Sugarcoat it … People are Not Reading Your Stuff:”
As my old Chemistry teacher used to say:
“Burn it with fire!” But, that might be too late, since they set themselves on fire long ago!
WaPo and the NYT are not even fit to wrap fish
Once a beacon of truth, now tainted with lies,
The newspaper’s decline, a sad demise.
Dishonesty crept into every headline,
Readers lost faith, a trust in decline.
Fabricated stories, twisted facts abound,
Integrity shattered, credibility drowned.
The ink that once flowed with honor and pride,
Now stained with deceit, nowhere to hide.
As subscriptions waned and readers walked away,
The newspaper’s downfall was on full display.
A cautionary tale of the cost of dishonesty,
In the world of journalism, a tragic legacy.
Ink fades, paper stills,
Left wing echoes silenced, lost,
Newsprint’s final breath.
Let them continue to fail.
People want me to experience bad things, so I don’t care when they experience bad things.
No one wants you to experience bad things. We dont care that much. It is your bad decisions that you experience bad things and are generally miserable.
If people don’t give me things that make me happy, they make me experience bad things, so I hate them and want to pull them into my crab pot, too.
Why should anyone give you anything? Are you so entitled that everyone is responsible for your well being except you?
Crab pot, sounds like you need a visit to the Free Clinic. They got a shot for that.
I don’t care that much about the decline in the quality of the writing at the Washington Post, or even the ridiculous liberal bias. What I miss are the CYNICS. I miss the Bill Mahrs of the journalistic world who, even if they are totally in the tank for the Democratic Party, at least still have a functioning brain stem. There is so much of the Left’s excesses that are just stupid. Gays for Palestine! Men can be women! Abortion is freedom! There’s no other word to describe it. Sure, call the Republicans cowards and sinners, but the Democrats are just as bad: contradictory, illogical, remorseless. They wouldn’t know a guiding principle if it hit them in the head.
Hint – you are writing advocacy journalism if Donald Trump always chooses your articles to quote at his press briefings to support his legal positions.
Hopefully you’ve never chosen the Constitution to quote for your comments, because that would prove you are an advocacy reader. Yes, that’s as lame as it sounds.
Advocacy for fairness and honesty is exactly what we need.
We will know they are serious about changing when they remove the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” header. The Post has been a major purveyor of darkness for years.
100%. Man, what a tell that was!
Kinda like, “Don’t Be Evil”
Andrew Colletti said: “We will know they are serious about changing when they remove the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” header.”
In the interest of honesty, that should be replaced with “Liberty Dies in DC”.
“Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Andrew, it may be the one truth the paper reports. Their former readers merely took them up on it.
Why should anyone have a right to run a newspaper while they are oblivious to so many of my rights? They should have their
offices ransacked by club-wielding goons.
Nah, let them rot.
Thr New York Times debased itself much earlier and more thoroughly, with “news analysis.” Their whole get Trump movement, where they relied on disgruntled heiress Mary as a source, was ridiculous. The only conservative voice they publish, free to speak his mind, is the annual column by MoDo’s brother. Douthat and Stephens must constantly color within the lines.
JT admits he is always an optimist, and he proves it again. I would love to see the reporting return to reporting, but I am a skeptic.
Guy who is a tenor Legal Analyst for FoxNews writes a whole column against advocacy journalism and writing off half your audience. This is the outlet that paid nearly a billion dollars to Dominion voting systems because telling the truth would have lost them audience.
Irony and self-awareness are dead.
Bubba,
That’s a great observation. It’s odd the professor never mentions NewsMax or OAN as abusers of advocacy journalism because they are. All journalism these days is advocacy journalism. Not just “mainstream media”.
“Let’s Not Sugarcoat it … People are Not Reading Your Stuff:”
Advocacy journalism is not journalism.
Advocacy journalism is propaganda.
In this case, DNC propaganda.
let me take a swag and suggest that you’ve never watched any of Professor Turley’s appearances on Fox News
Bingo! Dropped all my subscriptions to main stream newspapers, magazines and cable TV! I might as well pay for what i want to read, hear and see! That was 3 years ago and was so liberating and enlightening.
Refreshing good news to start a morning.
I miss the Evening Star.