If you go to the home page of the Washington Post right now, you’ll still see the words “Democracy Dies in Darkness” displayed prominently across the masthead.
The phrase always seemed a little sententious, one of those taglines, like “sunlight is the best disinfectant” (not strictly correct) or “facts matter” (well, duh), beloved of the marketing departments of media organisations during the first reign of Donald Trump.
The Post’s great rival, the New York Times, has dialled back on this stuff in recent years, presumably realising that selling your supposedly objective reporting as the voice of the resistance simply plays into the hands of Steve Bannon and his ilk.
That repositioning, though, has been carried out from a position of strength; the Times has been on an upward roll for the past few years and can make its choices in a rational and strategic way.
Jeff Bezos has made a sacrificial offering of the Washington Post. A once-great newspaper is dying in darkness
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“Democracy Dies in Darkness” was the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, who purchased the Post from the Graham family in 2013. At the time the sale was widely seen (including by the Grahams) as a means of securing the newspaper’s future. Bezos, who offered assurances he would not intervene in editorial matters, would bring his vast wealth, business acumen and technological resources to the task of reconstructing the Post as a viable 21st-century media company.
That dream died this week, although it had been on life support for a while. The Washington Post’s business has been in trouble for several years. It failed to diversify into areas such as food, games and sport that have been so lucrative for its New York competitor. Circulation has seen an alarming decline. Losses have mounted. Insiders grumbled that Bezos was insufficiently involved in business decisions and that there was no clear strategy.
Last year things started to change. A new senior editorial team was installed. For the first time, Bezos intervened directly in editorial decisions to spike the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the US presidential election. Star journalists began to leave. Subscribers cancelled in droves.
On Wednesday, Bezos announced a change of direction on the Post’s opinion pages, which would henceforth “be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
As Bezos explains it, the time has passed when a newspaper needs to reflect a broad diversity of views. “Today, the internet does that job,” he declared before proclaiming himself “of America and for America, and proud to be so”.
Tempting though it may be, it would be a waste of time to parse the banalities of the rest of the letter, its valorisation of “freedom” while shutting down dissenting opinions, the David Brent-style description of his parting with the paper’s opinion editor: “I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’ After careful consideration, David decided to step away.”
Hell no, then.
But none of that matters. This is not a plan to save the Washington Post by ideologically repositioning it. One could make a case, at a push, for doing that, as other media owners have done.
You could also argue that the whole idea of an opinion page requires some radical rethinking in the internet age. Unlike on this side of the Atlantic, opinion writing in American newspapers is separated from the rest of the operation and reports to the publisher rather than the editor. It’s a fine theological distinction that many readers probably don’t appreciate or just find meaningless.
Anyway, Bezos’s announcement has nothing to do with any of that. This is a sacrificial offering to the man living down the road from the newspaper’s K Street offices, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The flaw in the calculations of those who sold the Washington Post in order to save it was their belief that the new proprietor would value the legacy and social responsibility of the paper that had published the Pentagon Papers and brought down Richard Nixon.
Who knows whether Bezos actually believed that himself at the time, but, in our new oligarchical age, the Post has become a bauble in the greater game of protecting a billionaire’s vast business interests in online commerce, web services and space travel.
The sad, brutal truth is that, in such calculations, a once-great newspaper is a makeweight that barely matters at all. You could say it’s dying in darkness.
