The announcement that the Washington Post is laying off one-third of its staff is big news. It reflects an ongoing reversal of more than half a century of deleterious trends in journalism.
“The troubled Post began implementing large-scale cutbacks on Wednesday, including eliminating its sports department and shrinking the number of journalists it stations overseas,” AP reported while bravely fighting back the tears. “Significantly, our daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.” Executive Editor Matt Murray told the paper’s staff.
That indicates gross inefficiency. A spokesperson for the newspaper said the cuts were difficult but part of a necessary “significant restructuring across the company.”
The Washington Post was losing money, and lots of it. One hundred percent predictably, the staff blamed owner Jeff Bezos and … President Donald Trump: “The newspaper has been bleeding subscribers in part due to decisions made by [Bezos]—pulling back from an endorsement of Kamala Harris, a Democrat, during the 2024 presidential election against Trump, a Republican, and directing a more conservative turn on liberal opinion pages,” AP reported.
The notion that all would be hunky-dory down at the WaPo if Bezos had allowed the staff to endorse the absurd Harris and the homunculus Tim Walz and continue doing the very things that were pushing the newspaper far beyond financial straits that would normally result in bankruptcy is pretty funny. Who knew the AP was so gifted at satire?
The layoffs reflect a severe conflict between Washington Post journalists and … journalism. A couple of weeks ago, Washington Post staff and other journos around the country took to their fainting couches after federal agents confiscated “a phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch” from WaPo journalist Hannah Natanson in “an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials,” AP reported at the time.
The Regime Media denounced it as an unconstitutional attempt to chill criticism of the Trump administration. “The action ‘signals a growing assault on independent reporting and undermines the First Amendment,'" said Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at the advocacy group PEN America,” AP reported. “Like [Columbia University professor Jameel] Jaffer, he believes it is intended to intimidate.”
The notion that anything could stop Regime Media journalists from criticizing the Trump administration is more fanciful than the strangest fantasies of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.
Notably, numerous conservatives and libertarians joined the chorus of consternation at this search and seizure, taking the leftist line that the action abridged the freedom of the press, which the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from doing.
That was an entirely false characterization of the situation. The government’s confiscation of evidence in the investigation of a crime—a crime that the journalist may be implicated in committing if she had those classified materials in her possession—does not prevent the press from publishing anything based on information it has obtained legally.
Freedom to do one thing does not mean freedom to do everything else you claim to see as connected to it. That is a silly argument. Does it make extortion legal if I publish a (so-called) news story based on information I may extract from the victim?
How about bribery? OK with that? Hey, if another country invades the United States and takes over our newspapers as part of establishing totalitarian rule, it’s acceptable because Freedom of the Press, right?
That kind of arrogant, elitist, brain-dead “thinking” destroyed the credibility of American journalism and accelerated the industry’s demise and ongoing transformation into something very different. Is what we have now better? Well, it’s certainly not worse.
The Washington Post and nearly all other newspapers should now have staffs about the size of the Daily Caller. Waste not, want not.
If that means some news “beats” get less coverage, that’s just too bad. We’ll get by.
The news media exist to make money. Their self-characterization as a Fourth Estate that speaks truth to power, holds politicians’ feet to the fire, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, blah blah blah, is a genius-level sales pitch and nothing more.
These are the very people who conspired with the Biden campaign to suppress legitimate and important news (especially Hunter Biden’s laptop computer revelations) that would have benefited Donald Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, and who then worked with the Biden administration to censor every bit of information that showed what a catastrophic mess the Biden team was creating.
The truth came out when Elon Musk bought Twitter.
For decades, the Regime Media bamboozled the American people into thinking of them as a public good. They are nothing of the sort and never have been. The “news” media are a private, profit-seeking enterprise. Their market appeal is in their ability to increase their readers’ social status through the latter’s ingestion and repetition of received opinion.
The Regime Media sell social status, not wisdom, knowledge, or even information. Just status.
Their overt politicization and partisanship over the past several decades, especially in the wake of Watergate and the Washington Post’s braggadocio about bringing down a sitting president, have increasingly divorced journalists from their customers and exposed their self-important claims of special status as self-serving and disgusting.
The media’s sharp turn to the left began in the 1960s, accelerated in the 1990s, and rocketed into outright Soviet-style propaganda in the 2020s. Now the results are in. As with American elections, it takes a very long time for the foreordained decision to arrive.
The American people have done what the Washington Post staff, the rest of the Regime Media, and their well-paid allies in nonprofits, NGOs, and academia continually claimed President Trump was going to do (which he never would or could). The people are silencing the Regime Media.
Want to avoid getting your reporting chilled? Don't stink at it and be a Rainbow Communist troll.
S. T. Karnick (https://stkarnick.substack.com/) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and author of the Life, Liberty, Property weekly e-newsletter.