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Four Reasons Why the Washington Post Is Dying

Scott McClallen
Scott McClallen  |  February 08, 2026 3:00 PM

The Washington Post laid off 300 people recently, but it has been dying for over a decade. 

The paper laid off its sports team, photographers, and many of its climate change reporters. 

What caused its decline? First, many Washington Post stories were painfully bad and written to confirm the biases of Democratic voters. 

Second, there was little variety of ideas among many writers, even their 20 or so climate reporters, who all believed the world is melting and dying.

Some defended WaPo’s work, including Wall Street Journal writer Peggy Noonan. But when was the last time that the Washington Post regularly broke news? Instead, now it runs think pieces and slop instead of hard-hitting, investigative work. The world might have needed good investigative journalism the most during the COVID pandemic, but WaPo didn't deliver that. 

Third, the newspaper's daily story output drastically dropped.  WaPo's "daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years," WaPo editor Matt Murray told the New York Times. I don't know what these 300 people were doing for the past five years, but they apparently weren't writing many stories. 

The point of journalism is to make money, because without it, your paper will fail. 

Fourth, even after 300 people were laid off, WaPo is still bad. The newspaper apparently believed that the most important player of the Super Bowl on Feb. 8 was Colin Kaepernick, a social justice warrior who isn’t competing today.