The Patriot Post® · Troubles at The Washington Post

In the middle of last summer, it was reported that Jeff Bezos’s Leftmedia toy, The Washington Post, was facing some significant challenges due to falling subscription and readership numbers.

Following a subscription peak of three million in 2020, the Post has experienced a steady bleeding of subscribers over the Joe Biden presidency, with numbers shrinking to 2.5 million by July 2023. Similarly, the Post’s online engagement has fallen precipitously from a high of 139 million visitors a month down to less than 60 million.

Ya hate to see it.

All this has the Post heading toward a $100 million loss for 2023, which has the Leftmedia organ planning to hand some 240 employees their walking papers.

Amazon’s Bezos famously bought the Post back in 2013 for $250 million. However, after a decade of ownership, it appears the paper is becoming more of a financial liability than an asset.

While the Post, like many other Leftmedia outlets, enjoyed the boom years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the activists who run the paper also pushed an incessantly negative and biased coverage of his term. The result was an unhealthy dose of misinformation as news, like the Russia collusion hoax, as well as an avoidance of legitimate news stories, like Hunter Biden’s laptop.

With a cadre of leftist “journalists” like Taylor Lorenz, the Post has increasingly embraced the tenets of wokeism and has promoted narrative as news. Any effort to adhere to objectivity as a standard for reporting the news while simply helping the reader come to an informed conclusion has been classified as dangerous to democracy.

So, while the Post loses money, it calculates whether a steady dose of fearmongering about Trump will bring in the big bucks again. The Post ramped up coverage of him again this past summer. However, it doesn’t appear that Trump Derangement Syndrome is boosting the Post’s falling subscription numbers. Imagine that: Hysteria is no longer selling.

Of course, that reality won’t be enough for the Post to change course for two reasons. First, a drastic course correction toward fair and balanced coverage of Washington politics would risk losing the paper’s remaining hard-left readership. Second, a move like that would likely require even more layoffs of the media outlet’s nearly uniformly hard-left staff.

Is Bezos willing to press forward with such a course-correcting challenge, or is he simply looking for an opportunity to offload an increasingly expensive indulgence? Time will tell.

In the meantime, this may yet prove to be another example of getting woke and going broke. If fewer and fewer people are picking up what you’re laying down, you might be on borrowed time.