I picked up a subscription shortly after Trump was elected the first time, and really appreciated the paper. I dropped it when Bezos tried hard enough to kill it that a lot of the best reporters left. But they are still publishing interesting-appearing articles. And the price is $20 for a year (if you remember not to automatically renew), which is basically free.
I don’t hate Bezos. I think he is afraid of Trump and caved. I don’t think Amazon is fundamentally more evil than most other large companies, and anyway, I’m still buying from Amazon. (Less than I had been, but if i really wanted to boycott, i would have stopped using it.)
Really, i wonder if the paper is still worth reading, or if it’s been too weakened to be worthwhile, or worse, corrupted into a source of misinformation.
I don’t think it’s worth it. I think corporate owned and legacy media journalism is hopelessly corrupt, even while occasionally they might create good things. They’re still beholden to corporate overlords, who can’t at all be trusted right now.
For American politics, I highly recommend Talking Points Memo (which is owned by its editor-in-chief). I think a basic subscription there is roughly $3 per month. I get the ad-free sub, which is a few dollars more.
I’ve seen a lot of opinion-section headlines and excerpts circulating that pretty definitively document its decline and corruption in alignment with Bezos’s agenda.
Jeff Bezos may indeed be cowardly, but mostly he is just craven. The Washington Post was always a vanity project for him (and possibly a tax shelter as it consistently lost many tens of millions of dollars a year) but I was perfectly happy to overlook Bezos’ personally failings to support the good journalism done at WP up until Bezos appointed William Lewis as CEO and Publisher, and Lewis in turn started cranking the thumbscrews on editorial oversight, essentially eliminating the independence to pursue stories and publish unflattering articles and op-eds about anybody in power regardless of political alignment. The effective censuring of cartoonist Ann Telnaes followed by resignations of many prominent journalists and opinion writers along with giving an editorial “thumbs up” to all but a few of Donald Trump’s picks for Cabinet secretaries and major agency heads cemented that despite individual investigative reporters still doing good work there was no longer journalistic freedom, integrity, or even rationality at the editorial level. Unless or until that changes, I have no interest in subscribing to The Washington Post.
By the way, Bezos didn’t ‘cave’ because of personal fears or that the government would go after Amazon; he gave in because they threatened to take away contracts for his Blue Origin space launch venture. To the extent that is a legitimate threat, Bezos could still afford to fund Blue Origin indefinitely from his own substantial wealth, even without engaging in a little belt-tightening by just having to sell a megayacht or two. He has not only the wealth but the power and influence to stand up to Trump, Thiel, Musk, and the rest of those turds if he just had a backbone. Instead, he became a fawning toe-rag, donating $1M to Trump’s inauguration campaign.
I would describe most corporate media outlets as less corrupt than just co-opted, and not by ‘liberals’ but in the service of business interests to turn a blind eye to real issues to focus on the trivia or send out a pro-corporate message. They still often have dedicated journalists with integrity working for them but they often spike stories and try to muzzle journalists from speaking up, a.k.a. the once respected 60 Minutes or The New York Times selling the fraudulent message of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify invasion at behest of the Bush administration.
The news articles in The Washington Post supply information that makes it clear how little Trump and his followers believe in the concept of truth, but they don’t have to spell that out. The opinion articles and the letters are a mix of various political opinions. They are not typically oriented toward the right at all. The paper no longer endorses any candidate, but if you read the news articles it’s clear that Trump and his followers shouldn’t be in any important political positions. Of course, most of the paper’s contents are not political at all, with subjects like sports, book and movie reviews, business, classified, weather, comics, and obituaries, although some of those articles are implicitly more oriented to the left than the right . The Washington Post gives me a source for a huge amount of political news that isn’t remotely favoring Trump and his followers. In fact, it’s far more than I have time to read at all.
The WaPo just doesnt endorse candidates for national office. That is not some cowardly stance, many other major papers will not endorse candidates-
Take the Wall Street Journal- Pretty damn old Scholl conservative- doesnt endorse Hasnt for a long time.
Tampa bay times, LA Times, USA Today, etc.
Not to mention, it seems that newspaper endorsements for national office are meaningless anyway.. They can effect local offices, because some voters dont know all the minor candidates.
Right, hardly pro=trump. in fact the opposite.
I dont like WAPO due to its paywall, but I have no issues with Bezos or it’s editorial stance. BTW , Bezos has not much to do with Amazon anymore. He owns less than 10% ot it now.
I cancelled my subscription to the Post last year because a steady stream of journalists left. My parents had a subscription to the WaPo before I was born and I always had a subscription, so this is the first time in my life I haven’t had a subscription. The Post I liked doesn’t really exist anymore.
I don’t know what you’re saying here. My point is that The Washington Post is not remotely pro-Trump. If you read each article about political matters carefully, it’s clear that they think Trump and his supporters are wrong about most matters. They just feel that they don’t have to start each article with a withering blast at Trump and his supporters. They just give you the facts which make it clear how messed up they are. Incidentally, Bezos owns The Washington Post completely. Amazon doesn’t own them at all.
My only problem recently with The Washington Post is that for the past few years they have been slowly decreasing the number of pages in each day’s paper. This means that they don’t lose as much money each year. They thus don’t supply as much information each day as they used to.
It has done so in previous elections. That the editorial board drafted an endorsement for Kamala Harris but was restrained from publishing it by William Lewis late in the campaign tells you what you need to know about the loss of editorial independence. Whether you feel that the editorial board should express a preference for candidates in a normal electoral context, media outlets do have a vested interest in journalistic freedom and electoral integrity, and there was one candidate in the 2024 presidential election who openly threatened both.
Yup. I have no issue with publications that never issue endorsements. But pulling an endorsement because of political pressure is terrible.
That being said, i have no interest in the editorial section. I used to follow their science reporting (which was quite good), and their local Washington reporting, and their political reporting. And i enjoyed some of their fluff, like Miss manners. Their political reporting is presumably gone. How about the other stuff?
You’re in good company here. When asked in 2006 about bias and partisanship in media (ironically, in a chat with Washington Post readers), this is what Noam Chomsky notably said:
“It’s hard to give a measure. There are too many dimensions, too much variability. There are outstanding reporters and commentators, but as a broad generalization, I think it is fair to say that the media adopt the basic framework of state and private power, mostly uncritically. It’s not hard to demonstrate, and plenty has been written revealing these unfortunate but typical patterns – which are by no means new.”
Which is why I keep going on again and again about the importance of funding independent public media like all other civilized countries do. But in the US, public media has been chronically underfunded forever, barely kept afloat by donations, and now Trump has killed off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting altogether.
Yes, exactly, and i agreed. WAPO is NOT pro-trump.
So? A totally meaningless endorsement, and many other large papers have stopped bothering with it.
Sure, you got NYT- which did endorse Harris- after running Front page attack articles since she wouldnt kiss the publishers ass… err ring. I mean saying Biden is a senile old fool who needs a drool bucket and changing the bucket was all Harris did- then saying- “Okay, vote for her anyway, the other guys is worse” is damning with faint praise. Nit to mention NY state is solidly deep blue anyway.
The next five largest US papers didnt endorse for president. So of the top six, only the NYT did- sorta, kinda not really.
The editorial board which drafted the endorsement and and the many opinion columnists and editors that decried the last minute decision holding back the endorsement didn’t feel that it was “a useless and meaningless gesture” (your words corrected); that decision was made strictly by Jeff Bezos and (maybe) William Lewis. Whatever else you want to opine about about newspaper endorsements, this is an unambiguous usurpation of editorial independence, as was forcing a mostly favorable evaluation of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries and agency heads.
A useless gesture that every other top US newspaper doesnt bother with anymore.
Of the top 6 only the NYT does it, and we know that their “endorsement” aint worth shit..
Yeah, the Publishers get to decide where or not the paper will run a comics section or movies reviews or whatever. That is the job of the Publisher, not the editors. I worked for the LA Herald Examiner, and the publisher makes the big decisions, not the editors. You can see that in the hit pieces the PUBLISHER of the NYT wanted put on the front pages of his paper , excoriating Biden.
You use that term as if you think that means the actual EDITORS have independence or that the term generally refers to the editors of a paper. No, it refers to the PUBLISHERS, not the editors.
The Washington Post has not in general liked Trump’s cabinet secretaries and agency heads. It appears to me that in general one can distinguish two groups of high-level federal workers. One group is the ones that actually agree with Trump (or at least don’t publicly say that they think he’s wrong about almost everything). The second group are those who have worked their way up in the federal government all their life. These people know that so far they haven’t had to publicly disagree with Trump. They are trying to hold off as long as possible any such disagreement, because they know the moment they do so, they will be fired.
