The Washington Post Is An Unprofitable Disaster
When did legacy journalists and the politicians who love them become such a squawking bunch of overwrought socialists?
When news broke yesterday of a bloodbath at The Washington Post - 300 employees were laid off - a chorus of imbeciles rose up to demand that owner Jeff Bezos prop up the losing enterprise with his own pocket money.
The Washington Post has been unprofitable for decades. The newspaper was losing $49 million in the first half of 2013 when Jeff Bezos rescued the paper by buying it for $250 million in cash.
This year The Post is on track to lose $100 million.
"We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” WaPo CEO and publisher Will Lewis told staff on Monday.
Their reaction? Not shame that their product is poor, but a general sense of entitlement to their owner’s personal funds.
New York Times White House reporter and former Washington Post reporter Peter Baker expressed his indignation that Bezos isn’t personally supporting the Post workers.
News Flash, Peter: Just because he owns The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos does not owe employees lifetime jobs while the corporation is losing tens of millions EVERY YEAR.
The Washington Post is a business, not a charity. Bezos didn’t get to be a billionaire by guaranteeing jobs to workers who are producing a product no one wants to buy.
Baker was predictably joined by radical leftist Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
The simultaneous sense of entitlement coupled with naked hostility toward billionaire Bezos is ugly. But not unexpected.
Look, as a former Washington Post employee I’m saddened by news of the massive layoffs at the newspaper. The Post hired me right out of college and I spent six wonderful years there. I feel for people suddenly facing unemployment. Been there, done that. But their reaction to layoffs yesterday was excessive.
Its worth noting that The Post today is unrecognizable from the feisty newspaper of 50 years ago. For decades it’s been a tedious, predictable leftist mouthpiece, obediently cranking out story after story promoting the Russia collusion hoax, the government-approved covid orthodoxy and endless climate sensationalism.
Shoot, the paper reportedly settled for an undisclosed sum when it was sued by one of the Covington Catholic kids who was defamed by the left-wing newspaper.
Don’t forget, the leftist staff nearly staged an insurrection in the fall of 2024 when Bezos reportedly decreed that The Post would not endorse Kamala Harris for president and instead endorse no one.
Key staffers quit and a number of others joined to pen a public statement howling about the decision of their publisher. How dare The Washington Post not endorse the Democrat for president, even if she was a sputtering, unintelligent, day drunk?
Their anger was seen as subtly urging readers to cancel their digital subscriptions, which they did in droves.
Former Post editor Marty Baron weighed in yesterday, in a predictably theatrical pronouncement that sounded like a warning about the end times.
“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” said Baron. “The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”
Oh, please.
Sorry, but the staff of the Post is no braver than the tens of thousands of other journalists who lost their jobs over the past two decades. Arguably, those who worked at small local papers represented a bigger loss to their readers as their communities have suffered from losing their sole source of local news.
Yet, in weepy videos yesterday, these unemployed journalists looked more like emo theater kids than tough reporters. They need to do what everyone else does when they suddenly lose a job - I speak from experience here - dust themselves off, behave like adults and find something else to do. There is no crying in journalism.
Jeff Bezos isn’t the problem at The Post.
The staff with their insufferably stupid assignments - a health reporter whose beat was to “cover health disparities & explore the way racism & social inequality affects health” and 13 climate reporters (trimmed from 30 a few years ago) - was.
I don’t blame Bezos for refusing to waste any more of his own money keeping this bloated staff in paychecks.
