The broadcast outlets that were most upset about The Washington Post announcing they were cutting 300 jobs were NPR and PBS. It makes sense, since the journalists at these outlets have no intention of trying to make money. They expect people to hand them endless millions so they can make the kind of “news”/commentary that attempts to change the world in their ideological direction.
They have internalized the trauma of President Donald Trump and the Republicans taking away an annual half-billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies.
On the Saturday before the layoffs, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik explained the view from Post staffers: “They’re saying that readers of The Washington Post deserve sophisticated, contextualized reporting that requires a sophisticated, contextualized reporting team.” These are buzzwords for liberal bias, the same way Dan Rather always told people CBS gave you “context and perspective.”
Weekend anchor Scott Simon asked Folkenflik: “The Washington Post — it’s a paper woven into U.S. history. Has it really come to this?” The media reporter naturally thought of taking down President Richard Nixon, as liberals do: “Well, obviously, you think of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers and other historic moments, but they’re also doing things at the moment. They are holding power to account.”
This being NPR, no one was going to consider conservatives suggesting that pandering to the left-wing base of the Democrat Party might not be a stellar business strategy. One of the amusingly tone-deaf moments before the Post job cuts came when staffers were hoping to enlist actors Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks to lobby the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos. They had starred in the 2017 movie “The Post,” which glamorized the paper’s war on Nixon.
When liberal journalists blather about “holding power to account,” they really should ask if outlets like the Post energetically worked to hold the Biden administration to account. The Post wasn’t going to win a Pulitzer Prize for exposing Hunter Biden. Instead, in 2022, the Post won a prize for its reporting on the January 6 riot. Even the prize system is all about holding only one party accountable.
Instead, we remember Post front-page articles like this Eli Saslow banger weeks after Barack Obama won in 2008. Obama “was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions. The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.” You could make a movie out of this, but it might be NC-17.
WASHINGTON POST REELING FROM BUYOUT EXODUS AS BOSSES HOPE TO TURN THE PAGE AT EMBATTLED PAPER
When the Post announced the job cuts, CBS anchor Jessi Mitchell summarized on its early-morning newscast: “Outrage sparked online after the announcement, calling out the publication’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, for the decision.”
On NPR, Folkenflik recalled that Bezos used to be a role model (for lefties). He “was seen as a savior, a champion of tough and intense journalism, has not interfered with the newsroom, but he’s apparently had enough.”
Now, he argued, “You’ve seen both Marty Baron and Marcus Brauchli — two distinguished former executive editors of The Washington Post — just in the last hour or two share information with me, saying basically there seems to be no strategy. The Washington Post, its readers and the country deserve better.”
Baron is a poster boy for crusading liberal journalism. He was glamorized for The Boston Globe’s war on the Catholic Church in the 2015 movie “Spotlight.” Now he’s starred in several PBS segments lamenting Bezos. On “Amanpour & Co.” on January 23, he suggested Bezos was far too “tepid” toward Trump and no longer lives up to the Post’s drama-queen motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
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After the cuts were announced, “PBS News Hour” interviewed Baron for seven minutes, and he said the cuts did “enormous damage” to the paper. Baron uncorked the entire leftist critique. Bezos drove away the leftist subscribers by killing the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024, and then Bezos appeared on stage at Trump’s inauguration. He bought rights to Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice” for Amazon Prime and bankrolled a big documentary on Trump’s wife and First Lady, “Melania.”
Baron was so upset he added the Post bosses were “completely changing the opinion pages so that essentially they have no columnists who are really left of center. And they’re very deferential to Trump. And I think they lack a moral core.” This would come as a surprise to their Trump-haters like Max Boot, David Ignatius, Kathleen Parker and Fareed Zakaria, to name a few.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (last seen running for office as a Democrat in his native Oregon), tweeted out the NPR/PBS mindset: “Jeff Bezos, who could keep the Wash Post a pillar of American democracy with the change dug out from his limousine seats, sets an example of surrender to authoritarianism for every other business person and institution in America.”
Everything is very black and white for these journalists. You are either raging against the Trump machine or you are collaborating with their imaginary Hitler. Their hurt feelings at Bezos feel like a tsunami of moral superiority and entitlement.
