The Washington Post Is in Free Fall—and There’s One Person to Blame

At CBS, Weiss is undermining that credibility because everyone knows she is putting her thumb on the scale to push stories to the right. She is also weakening that infrastructure because key staffers are quitting instead of working for her. By laying off foreign correspondents and other key staffers, the Post is directly eliminating this infrastructure. And this can’t easily be replaced. I love all of the various newsletters on Substack and other platforms that have cropped up in the last few years. The New Republic, Mother Jones, and other avowedly liberal media outlets are critical. But at the end of the day, none of those titles have reporters around the world covering the news, or teams of editors and reporters who can spend months on a single investigative project.

The mainstream media has many, many flaws. And The New York Times, Associated Press, CNN, Reuters, and numerous other outlets with foreign bureaus and huge news teams remain. But the Post once approached the ambition and scale of the Times. It was great to have a second paper of that stature. It’s sad to see that gone.

Now, let me move to that forthrightness and honesty about the Republican Party. I worked at the Post as a reporter from 2007 to 2011. Back then, the paper was struggling financially and was in some ways adrift journalistically too. The rise of Trump revitalized the Post. A presidential administration that was constantly trying to flout democratic norms and hide its corrupt and often illegal actions was a perfect foil for the paper. During Trump’s first term, it broke numerous stories of the president’s misdeeds. That resulted in a huge surge in subscriptions and readership.