Washington Post Lays Off One-Third of Its Staff

My condolences. However, it could not happen to a more deserving bunch of people, although the competition for most in need of defenstration is a tie among all the Regime Media.

The Washington Post has announced that it is laying off one-third of its staff. AP reports (with tears in their AP eyes):

The troubled Post began implementing large-scale cutbacks on Wednesday, including eliminating its sports department and shrinking the number of journalists it stations overseas. The changes were announced by executive editor Matt Murray in a Zoom meeting with staff. …

Murray acknowledged that the cuts will be a shock to the system but said the goal is to create a Post that can grow and thrive again.

“The Washington Post is taking a number of difficult but decisive actions today for our future, in what amounts to a significant restructuring across the company,” a Post spokesperson said in a statement. “These steps are designed to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets The Post apart and, most importantly, engages our customers.”

The paper was losing money, and lots of it. One hundred percent predictably, the staff blamed owner Jeff Bezos and … President Donald Trump:

In recent weeks, many Post staff members have been appealing directly to the newspaper’s owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The newspaper has been bleeding subscribers in part due to decisions made by him — pulling back from an endorsement of Kamala Harris, a Democrat, during the 2024 presidential election against Trump, a Republican, and directing a more conservative turn on liberal opinion pages.

The notion that all would be hunky-dory down at the WaPo if Bezos had allowed the staff to endorse Harris and continue doing the very things that were pushing the newspaper far beyond financial straits that would normally result in bankruptcy is pretty funny. Who knew AP was so gifted at satire?

A couple of weeks ago, Washington Post staff and other journalists around the country took to their fainting couches after federal agents confiscated “a phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch” from WaPo journalist Hannah Natanson in “an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials,” AP reported at the time.

The Regime Media characterized the confiscation as an attempt to chill criticism of the Trump administration:

The action “signals a growing assault on independent reporting and undermines the First Amendment,” said Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at the advocacy group PEN America. Like Jaffer, he believes it is intended to intimidate.

The notion that anything could stop Regime Media journalistas from criticizing the Trump administration is more fanciful than the strangest fantasies of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.

Numerous conservatives and libertarians joined the chorus of consternation at this search and seizure, taking the leftist line that the action abridged the freedom of the press, which the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from doing.

That was an entirely false characterization of the situation. The government’s confiscation of evidence in the investigation of a crime—a crime that the journalist herself is implicated in committing if she had those classified materials in her possession—does not prevent the press from publishing anything based on information it has obtained legally.

Freedom to do one thing does not mean freedom to do everything else you claim to see as connected to it. That is a silly argument. Does it make extortion legal if I publish a (so-called) news story based on information I may extract from the victim?

How about bribery? Ok with that? Hey, if another country invades us and takes over our newspapers as part of establishing totalitarian rule, it’s acceptable because Freedom of the Press, right?

That kind of arrogant, elitist, brain-dead “thinking” destroyed the credibility of American journalism and accelerated the industry’s demise and ongoing transformation into something very different. Is what we have now, better? Well, it’s certainly not worse.

The Washington Post and nearly all other newspapers should now have staffs about the size of the Daily Caller. Waste not, want not.

If that means some news “beats” get less coverage, that’s just too bad. The news media exist to make money. Their self-characterization as a Fourth Estate that speaks truth to power, holds politicians’ feet to the fire, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, blah-blah-blah, is a great sales pitch and nothing more.

The Regime Media bamboozled the American people into thinking of them as a public good. They are nothing of the sort and never have been. They are a private, profit-seeking enterprise. Their market appeal is that they increase their readers’ social status through the latter’s ingestion and repetition of received opinion.

The Regime Media sell social status, not wisdom, knowledge, or even information. Just status.

Their overt politicization and partisanship over the past several decades, especially in the wake of Watergate and the Washington Post’s bragadoccio about bringing down a sitting president, increasingly divorced journalists from their customers and exposed their self-important claims of special status as self-serving and disgusting.

The media’s sharp turn to the left began in the 1960s, accelerated in the 1990s, and rocketed into outright Soviet-style propaganda in the 2020s. Now the results are in.

The American people have done what the Washington Post staff, the rest of the Regime Media, and their well-paid allies in nonprofits, NGOs, and academia continually claimed President Trump was going to do (which he never would or could).

Want to avoid getting your reporting chilled? Don't stink at it and be a Rainbow Communist troll.