The Patriot Post® · Troubled Waters at The Washington Post

The Washington Post was once a venerable leader of the national media. If something important happened in the nation’s capital, the Post was there to cover it. Sure, it always had a leftward bent, and its biggest claim to fame was taking down a Republican president, but at least it wasn’t full of insane left-wing activists posing as journalists.

Then, Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013, and Donald Trump first ran for president in 2015.

Between Bezos’s socialist worldview and Trump Derangement Syndrome — manifested by that pompous “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto it adopted just after Trump’s inauguration — the paper went completely off the rails and became little more than a tabloid.

Still, traffic and revenue surged during the Trump years, as left-wingers nationwide couldn’t resist tuning in to the chaotic and deranged coverage.

Readership fell off a cliff, however, post-COVID and post-Trump. That’s why Executive Editor Sally Buzbee was sent packing on Monday as part of what the Post itself reported is “a hastily announced restructuring plan aimed at stopping an exodus of readers over the past few years.”

Buzbee took over as executive editor in 2021, and she reportedly “chose to leave rather than be put in charge of one of the [new] divisions” created by the restructuring. The numbers belie that fig-leaf explanation.

“The Post’s website had 101 million unique visitors a month in 2020,” the paper reports, “and had dropped to 50 million at the end of 2023. The Post lost a reported $77 million last year.” Even billionaires don’t like losing that kind of money.

Bezos’s new publisher, Will Lewis, told staff, “I’m not interested in managing decline. I’m interested in growth.” So, through the election, former Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Matt Murray will take over for Buzbee.

You may be asking, Who cares about management positions at a rag like The Washington Post?

Well, the Post has been a flagship of the Leftmedia for decades. Its decline is emblematic of the decline of other traditional media outlets in recent years.

They all want to blame social media and a shift in the way the public consumes news. That’s true to a point — we can certainly say from our own experience that social media censorship can really hurt traffic. For the Leftmedia, however, the loss of readership didn’t happen in an algorithmic distortion field. It happened because they destroyed the trust Americans had in the media.

With the rise of conservative talk radio, cable news, and then the Internet in the ‘80s and '90s, consumers suddenly had alternatives for the first time. Rather than Leftmedia outlets re-dedicating themselves to objective and skilled reporting, however, they doubled down on left-wing propaganda, letting the mask slip entirely. When Trump came along, they even declared the objective coverage would be a failure to do their duty.

Then, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, they peddled misinformation while “fact-checking” questions and correct counter-information. It didn’t take long for Americans to tune out.

Undeterred by reality, however, the big reporter complaint quoted by fellow Leftmedia outlet NPR isn’t that the Post needed to get back to objective reporting. No, it was that “we have four white men running three newsrooms.” That’s right: Don’t do your job better; caterwaul about DEI.

This new DEI regime and the aforementioned destroyed trust have yielded massive layoffs all over the Leftmedia. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.