This is not good news. Lewis is scarcely the balanced journalist we might have hoped for. If we couldn’t get balance, we would have hoped for a slight liberal (factual?) bent. Instead we’ve been given this Murdoch trained Wall Street crony who will certainly serve the Bezos empire rather than the truth. I am heartbroken.
He has no background at all in Politics, which is the one thing in which the Washington Post has always been the top of the game. You might as well put a Social Media expert in charge of the Wall Street Journal.
"William Lewis, a reporter-turned-executive who spent years working in British media and for Rupert Murdoch-owned companies, has been named the CEO and publisher of The Washington Post.
As CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal from 2014 to 2020, Lewis was credited with increasing the Journal’s digital subscriber base. . ."
It had been heading in the wrong direction already since Marty Baron retired, but this is going to be a disaster for the paper. I don’t know who they think their target audience is, but ISTM that the right-wing media market is already pretty well saturated. Local RWNJ newspaper readers already have the Washington Times, and there’s a metric ton of national right-wing media already.
This is going to be like when JCPenney tried to go all young and hip a decade or so ago: they won’t pick up any new readers, and will drive away a lot of the old ones. Their readership will shrink to those who have to read the paper to stay on top of the politics of the nation’s capital.
I’m guessing this was the driving force behind the decision. Without subscribers any publication is fucked. The question is, where will he look for new subscribers and how will he attract them? It does not bode well…
I strongly believe that there is a real opening for a paper that was a de facto left-of-center paper strictly by virtue of (a) not bothsidesing everything, (b) dispensing with ‘access journalism’ and beat-sweetener pieces, and (c) reporting on ‘the stakes, not the odds’ - that is, straightforward reporting about what policies each party and its major politicians were for and against, and what the effects of those choices would likely be if implemented.
Oh, and (d) don’t just print quotes from people on both sides and call that a day. That’s stenography, not reporting. Follow up with good questions, dammit.
Anyhow, the WaPo has made a clear decision to not be that paper, to not take advantage of that opening. Would be nice if someone did. There needs to be something in the vast gulf between the FTFNYT and Mother Jones.
Advertising revenue may be the stumbling block here. Any leftish paper will, by definition, make some anti-corporate/anti-capitalist noises and that may not attract corporate/capitalist advertisers.
There are lots of small left sites out there, but they struggle, despite being more in line with what an awful lot of people think, compared to the WaPo/NYT etc.
Do there exist Marxist, Communitarian, or Anarcho-Primitivist advertisers?
True story, I once bought and read an issue of Adbusters, which was amusing at first but became increasingly tiresome with the larger and more frequent appeals to buy their shitty-looking hemp sneakers that culminated in a literal centerfold of something that looked like it came out of the costume design for a Mad Max film. While I subscribe to Mother Jones as an interesting counterpoint to most of the highly consumerized media, I think that in general “anti-capitalist media” is an oxymoron, or at least an animal that only comes out under the blood moon.
I think that was my point. Agree re Adbusters. Would agree with “anti-capitalist MASS media is an oxymoron.” Thus my point about there being many small, struggling left media operations, many of which do good work.
Sure, but I wasn’t talking about anything like that. I was suggesting the need for a newspaper or news channel that would do what we’d once have regarded as just playing it straight and doing the job.
Given the nature of our two parties nowadays, such a paper or channel would be regarded much more highly by persons to the left of center than to the right. But it would only stand out from other media because the FTFNYT and the mainstream media in general have bought into the notion that to be ‘fair’ and ‘unbiased’ means avoiding portraying either party as better or worse than the other, regardless of the facts.
If Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act on the afternoon of January 20, 2025, and Biden is old, they’re going to spend enough time on the latter, while all but ignoring the former, to make them look equally bad. Would a newspaper or cable news channel that dispensed with that absurdity really have a problem pulling in advertisers?
Marty Baron just wrote a book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, and in the excerpt I read he was pretty kind to Bezos. He says that Bezos stood up to Trump’s insistence on trading access for good stories and that he didn’t interfere with the tone of the paper.
Bezos may be doing a complete turnaround here. Or he may truly believe that with digital subscriptions being the only chance of survival, someone good at that job is the best candidate.
You can’t confuse the jobs of Publisher and Editor. I’m going to ask a mod to change the title. The job of the Publisher is to bring in money, not run the news department.
Like the rest of you, I’m innately suspicious of anyone connected to Murdoch. But the totality of Lewis’ Wikipedia page is one of enormous journalistic successes. Maybe it’s been rewritten to blot out the bad stuff. But just from what I read there, Lewis looks to be one of the best candidates in the world to run a major newspaper.