Freedom of the Press Doesn't Mean Freedom From Consequences
It's not Jeff Bezos's fault
Very few of the people laid off from the Washington Post today are at fault themselves, but Marty Baron is, and he has a lot to say about it. Baron says he appreciated Bezos’s confidence in the years he ran the paper, but questions him now.
The opposite is probably true, too. Bezos was new to an industry, took a light touch at first, then probably realized his first impressions were correct. Baron accuses Bezos of capitulating to Trump, and of cowardice over the decision to pull the endorsement of Kamala Harris. It’s probably too much to hope for Mr. Spotlight to have something to say about Jeffrey Epstein.
There is a rather unseemly and all too convenient failure to reckon with the paper’s major mistakes in the first Trump term, all of which lie at Baron’s feet. He criticizes the editorial page today, but it could hardly be worse than it was in Fred Hiatt’s latter years, especially after they got rid of Harold Meyerson, who was for a while the only regular columnist who sounded like a human being.
The paper went all-in for the Russiagate stuff, which is now discredited. At some points the paper came rather too close to being a participant in the choreography.
They went all-in for the first Trump impeachment over aid to Ukraine, which was not just naive but profoundly wrong-headed about the purpose of impeachments. After all this, a Kamala Harris endorsement would have meant nothing, because their credibility with a broader readership was shot. Is the expectation that Jeff Bezos must underwrite hundreds of millions of dollars in losses per year perpetually for this?
As liberals settle back into an old and comfortable pattern, skeptical toward wars and rediscovering that civil liberties are important, remember that the paper supported impeaching Trump for not being hawkish enough. For not being quick enough to shovel money into the war machine. This is an uncomfortable fact for all the people crowing today about the need to hold power to account.
The problem with this stuff is not that it’s liberal or hostile to the president or adversarial toward executive power generally, all of which a newspaper should be, it’s that these things reflect a discrediting lack of the expertise the Post used to be looked to for.
Trump produced an immune system response in Washington’s professional class, and that the Post should have reflected that is normal. It has always, and probably should, given the libs what they want 80 percent of the time. But it matters which 80 percent.
The nature of the business is in the delicate balance between telling someone what they want to hear, and trying to nudge them toward what they should hear or even, perhaps, should believe. Wokeness is an exercise in the latter, and the paper succeeded in getting on the same page about that with its readership of largely middle-class, white liberals in the first Trump term. Fine.
So what about when it comes time for a difficult, gutsy call, when you tell them their expectations are likely to be disappointed? That’s the sort of credibility-increasing prediction the Post failed to make in the first Trump term and it’s what rendered a potential endorsement in 2024 meaningless.
The way liberals these days tend to think is, if you predict something they don’t like with a big enough platform, you’re helping it come true, and are thereby pointing your guns in the wrong direction. This is nonsense, and a newspaper that runs this way is doomed.
The layoffs today are the price for being chicken littles in the first Trump term. It’s a high price that falls mostly on the heads of the innocent. Marty Baron ought to have something to say about that instead.