And then he also announced that he was going to change the opinion page, including the editorial page, and he was going to exclude from those pages, essentially, people who didn’t buy into this ideology of free markets and individual liberties. Of course, he didn’t define that. But what it meant in practice was that anybody who was left of center, even slightly left of center, was going to be excluded from the opinion pages of The Washington Post because they were evidently too critical of Donald Trump.
And even today, there’s absolutely no moral core to these editorials today. It’s not that they won’t criticize Trump from time to time, but they do so in the softest, most mealy-mouthed way. They always use it as an opportunity to also attack the Democrats. They’re constantly falling back on the phrase “overreach.” Well, it’s not overreach. It’s abuse of power. So, with all of these decisions, from the decision not to publish a presidential endorsement to the remake of the opinion pages—and particularly the remake of the editorials themselves—they’ve just driven away readers by the hundreds of thousands who are disgusted with what they’ve seen.
And so despite that fact, the newsroom, day-in and day-out, is just doing some tremendous work, and work that does hold the administration accountable. But it seems like with every reader they get in through the front door with great news coverage, they lose through the back door through these decisions that are being made by the owner, the publisher, and then also by the kinds of editorials that they seem to be running day after day.
So when Post leadership says the decline in audience is the result of a problem with the newsroom, the way you see it, it’s the leadership that is to blame for the decline in audience?
They had a lot of work to do. They had to make some changes, too. I don’t think it’s the quality of the reporting, but I think it’s a matter of how we communicate with the public. The way that people consume news and information is dramatically changing. And so if the way people consume information is dramatically changing, then the way you deliver information has to change dramatically as well. And so clearly there were things that needed to be done. Perhaps even very disruptive things that needed to be done. That said, ownership and the publisher, I believe, made things infinitely worse with their decisions. I mean, you lose hundreds of thousands of loyal subscribers? It’s appalling.
The editorial page editor, in his couple of interviews that he did—he did one with Fox News, and he did one with The National Review, which tells you what kind of audience he’s trying to reach. He basically portrayed readers who had abandoned the Post as being partisan, that their readership of the Post was driven by partisanship. Well, it wasn’t. They saw a president who was likely to abuse his power, who was in fact abusing his power. They felt that the press needed to play an important role in holding this government or any government to account. They saw The Washington Post as doing that really well, so they supported the Post with their subscriptions. That is not partisanship. That is citizenship. The idea that the press should hold the government to account, that’s what the press ought to be doing, and it’s appropriate that people support that.
Aidan McLaughlin
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