Some do. But the official stance of the Washington Post isn’t represented by those articles. It’s represented by, yes, the editorials.
For example, Bezos rejected an editorial cartoon that failed to adulate either Trump or himself; the cartoonist left rather than give in to the implicit requirement to avoid criticizing Trump.
Your idea that some articles that do criticize Trump outweigh the clear editorial direction of the paper under Bezos, is something you have every right to believe. But you can’t expect other people to share your view.
I never did have a subscription but I let my Prime expire a year ago last November and have not spent a dime with Amazon since then, particularly tough as I have a Kindle. This reinforces that decision.
I switched to a Kobo. It still supports side loading. I keep my e-library in Calibre. My next e-reader will probably be an e-ink generic tablet.
Once upon a time, the Kindle was really the best e-reader. It’s not, any more.
I still read the Post. I’ve never really read the editorial page of any newspaper. The Post continues to have excellent science reporting, and surprisingly okay political reporting. It doesn’t last it’s political spent bleed into the news articles as much as the NYT does.
Of course. A good many of the books in my Calibre library were snagged from Gutenberg and I get the Baen free books, as well as buying a couple every year.
Amazon was easier for the current stuff plus I was getting three or four of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series every year – about the pace he was writing them – and Amazon had them all easily ordered, sometimes even on sale.
Baron, the former executive editor, warned: “The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”…
“Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own,” Baron said. “This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”…
The union suggested that Bezos might not be the right owner for the Post. “If Jeff Bezos is no longer willing to invest in the mission that has defined this paper for generations and serve the millions who depend on Post journalism, then the Post deserves a steward who that will.”
Approximately one-third of employees were affected!
Seeking to lay out the business case for the layoffs, Murray said the move was “about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded and competitive and complicated media landscape”.
Is there a book with management language like this, or does it come naturally to some people?
The goal is to sound impressive and insightful while saying nothing beyond the trivially tautological. It’s a skill like any other and can be learned. But it does seem to pay well.
Much of what the Post’s former executive editor said there was actually understatement, although this sentence rings true: "Martin Baron, the Post’s executive editor until 2021, said: ‘This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations’.”
Essentially the Washington Post is no more, its motto now deeply ironic. It’s been thoroughly Trumpified.
It feeds on itself in management culture and is absorbed through osmosis by all participants who seek to be part of the management in-group. No one knows where it comes from. It’s usually more cryptic and elaborate than that – that statement sounds like an attempt to dumb down biz-speak into pseudo-English so reporters had some hope of unraveling its meaning, which I take to be basically this: “we want to maximize profits for Bezos while totally aligning ourselves with the Orange Tyrant by turning the Post into a disreputable right-wing rag, which we expect will make us very popular.”
I did the half-cancel suggested somewhere here (start the cancellation process, then accept a year at half price) when they failed to endorse Harris. I fully cancelled a few months ago, and told them why.
The Editorials were so poorly argued that they amounted to propaganda. I don’t mind right-wing editorials at all—I like being challenged in my ideas. So many of them were just stupid, and only worked if you had already swallowed a lot of the received wisdom on the right. I just could not pay to support that kind of writing.
Do you actually read The Washington Post, or do you just read what other people say about it? I read it every day It has lots of news articles, cartoons, editorials, opinion pieces, and reviews of current culture that’s not remotely pro-Trump. It just doesn’t need to scream about why those pieces are anti-Trump. Incidentally, subscribing to The Washington Post doesn’t make Bezos richer. He actually loses money on it. My calculation is that each yearly subscription from one household decreases his worth by about $100.
Bezos loses about $100,000,000 each year on The Washington Post. There are less than 100,000 people who get the paper delivered to their door each day. Each of those decreases Bezos’s worth by over $100.
I read about the mass firings and resignations of renowned journalists since William Lewis took over as publisher, after working for Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. Who also, in 2024, after WaPo had endorsed Democratic presidential candidates for a quarter of a century, declared that the paper would no longer do so. Who is going to write all these great articles when the best journalists have resigned or been fired?
Which raises two questions.
Why did this Trump-loving asshole buy a paper that was guaranteed to lose him money? If it was for political reasons, what does that say about the future of WaPo’s editorial policy, especially given the changes we’re already seeing.
What exactly is the meaning of this gobbledygook – “positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded and competitive and complicated media landscape” – if it isn’t expressing a desire to be more profitable?