A Media Collapse Long in the Making

This wasn't overnight.

(image credit: Jhaan Elker // The Washington Post)

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I had a conversation with a colleague right before Thanksgiving about The Washington Post in the midst of the fallout over the presidential endorsement quagmire.

They were furious that people were unsubscribing.

"This will only hurt reporters, not Bezos."

When I asked them if maybe readers aren't trying to hurt Mr. Bezos but simply no longer trust WaPo, they look scandalized.

"What do you mean?"

I told them that it feels like a lot of the public are dropping WaPo because they're worried about the paper, under its owner, either lying to them or suppressing stories, and they don't wanna enable that with a paid subscription.

My colleague wasn't hearing it.

They went on a rant about the importance of the free press and the historic role of WaPo and the great reporters there—many of them friends—and why unsubscribing isn't helping.

I told them I agreed with the first three things there, but how do we know we're getting good faith reporting?

And my colleague, needless to say, was not thrilled with this question. Because it's deeply uncomfortable, understandably so. It sucks to consider that one of our country's most venerable newspapers is slowly becoming a zombie outlet directly controlled by a corrupt billionaire.

(I did a brief rundown of the many problems at the Post for those interested.)

At the moment, there is a noticeable undercurrent of denial in D.C. circles over the diminishment of traditional political media with the Post being at the center of that discomfort.

And the biggest reasons within that are: 1) the well-earned reputation of WaPo for sterling journalism, which is strongly at odds with what we’re now witnessing, and 2) the way friendships within D.C. political and media circles are enabling some pretty heavy cognitive dissonance.

I don't mean that cynically, I promise. I mean that in the same way that every workplace and industry has a social scene. If you work in politics, you know people at WaPo, as colleagues or friends or both. I certainly do. It's historically a vanguard of democracy but also: a strong thread in D.C. social circles.

So, over the past 15 months, ever since William Lewis got hired to lead the outlet and through every subsequent cycle of "holy shit, what is going on at WaPo," the tension in this town has been building and building.

And now we've reached this drastic escalation in the past two months, and a lot of smart folks are still in denial.

Because maybe the one thing that's always felt reliable is that D.C. media and political culture—again, I mean that in a healthy, collegial way, not in a cynical way—may bend at times but will never break. Because there are norms, the biggest of which is that accurate and necessary reporting comes before relationships.

But the truth is that those norms have long been taking a beating, so this sudden evaporation isn’t terribly surprising.

Political media has been largely faltering for many years now. To be clear: yes, there are many exceptional reporters doing critical work but the problems within political media—double standards in reporting, suppressing or angling for access, imperviousness to criticism, neglecting reform—are very glaring.

This has been going on for a long time. It’s not a recent development.

I realize some folks will roll their eyes at this, but my hand to god, I strongly believe the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a major inflection point in how the public’s perception of political media began to change for the worst and from which it hasn’t really recovered.

Almost all of America media practically sleepwalked into enabling the Bush Administration to lie to the nation in order to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and in which no mass weapons of mass destruction were ever found. The evidence offered was threadbare and much of it came down to whether or not you trusted Colin Powell’s take.

Well, it turned out that Mr. Powell was dead wrong, there was very little credible evidence to support the stated reasons for the invasion (and that’s being generous), and almost the entire American media apparatus just kinda let it happen.

In fact, the only mainstream journalists who got it right and were quite loud in their skepticism were Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of the now-defunct Knight Ridder news service.

And with all due respect to Mr. Landay and Mr. Strobel, it wasn’t as though their excellent journalism was produced through a series of miracles. Any political journalist worth their salt at the big outlets like WaPo and The New York Times could have published similar stories.

But they didn’t, and instead of American political media reflecting on arguably the greatest collective failure of journalism in modern history and making necessary changes to prevent it from happening again, nothing much was done.

The two decades since have seen political media get things wrong on a fairly regular basis — often, it would seem, to preserve professional relationships and access.

I’m not saying this is all of political media. There are many outstanding journalists who are doing phenomenal work in informing the public and holding the powerful accountable and a lot of them work at WaPo and NYT.

But I do think the vast majority of political reporters were hoping that if they just stick to their beat, don't rock the boat, don't call out the bullshit happening in their industry around them, someone else would step up and fix these problems.

Some reporters will solely blame ownership and leadership, but honestly? All of us are complicit.

Owners are complicit, editors are complicit, reporters are complicit, electeds and staffers are complicit, readers are complicit, we're all complicit to some degree. We've all observed the bullshit at one point or another and hoped someone else would fix it.

But no one did.

By the way, I want to be abundantly clear this is not to say being a political reporter is some cushy, glamorous job centered in D.C. cocktail parties. Not at all the case. That's a dumb stereotype. Being a political reporter largely sucks right now, and I'm grateful for those journalists doing the hard and necessary work in this era.

But all those years of political media ignoring those glaring problems in the industry (and at their own outlets) and the need for professional reform and instead circling the wagons against criticism and placing the blame on "what the public wants" and strategically reporting with access in mind and ignoring problems because valued colleagues are involved ... all of it has now come to a head.

And suddenly, very shockingly, The Washington Post, one of the most celebrated newspapers in our country's political life, a champion of democracy and the free press, has become a poster for so much of what's wrong with political media, seemingly overnight.

But it wasn't overnight. It took many years to get here — many years of ignoring all the issues above and hoping someone else would fix them.

Trump didn't force political media to this place. He exploited existing problems in political media with maximum shamelessness, and it worked.

We're now in this moment in which so many political reporters are still doing great, essential journalism, but they're in a social system that strongly disincentivizes addressing the ethical weaknesses in political media that allowed Trump and disinformation to flourish in the first place.

And much to everyone's shock, that complex virus has completely overtaken the Post, and the response to it is a little too late and honestly pretty muted. I appreciate that there's been an exodus of reporters to other outlets, hoping to do essential journalism, but they could also say something about the problems at WaPo, too, right?

I mean... so many of these reporters—many of whom I genuinely admire—could say something about this mess. They could explain the exodus. They could tell the public: "Hey, things are pretty messed up there, and here's why..."

But... they're not really doing that. On Tuesday night, 400 WaPo staff signed a private petition sent to Mr. Bezos, warning him that the situation is dire, some of which was released to the public, but wouldn't it be more impactful to, you know, directly address the public? In the newspaper? Or at least on social media?

Really, think about this. Billionaires are shamelessly running amok across political media, engaging in blatant, open corruption, and the response of most reporters at these outlets is to very gingerly telegraph their concerns, mostly in private.

That feels... really off, no?

They're probably worried about getting fired or risking future employment at other outlets and that's understandable.

But last I checked, isn’t the whole point of journalism to speak truth to power and inform the public?

Maybe that’s another eye-rolling moment for a lot of folks, but I gotta tell ya: I’ve attended far too many public events in D.C. in which that exact sentiment has been expressed behind a podium by someone working at a major outlet, and I can’t ignore it.

Again: all the problems that existed before Trump, which went ignored, have now metastasized into something unmanageable.

It’s long past time for a lot of political reporters to do the hard thing here: publicly challenge the culture that allowed this to happen, and yes, that may mean making friends and colleagues in the industry uncomfortable.

So be it.

D.C. media culture is dangerously bending to the point of breaking, if it hasn’t already snapped, and it's got a lot of folks understandably rattled and some folks are still in denial over it all, and the mood here is palpable.

You can feel it.

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