The American Left Is Really Pissed About The Washington Post

Pissed in that American sense

I have long - a couple of decades now - been insisting that the American press is going to become more ideologically differentiated. The economics of this are inevitable. But this is what is really being whined about here:

Below the archaic font of the Washington Post’s masthead, its motto is printed in italic flourish: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

The publication has been enveloped in its own black cloud this week, as a worsening crisis sparked fears among staff – and media commentators – about the new British senior executives at the heart of its operation.

The Post’s British chief executive, Sir William Lewis – former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, who took up the role in January – blindsided journalists at the start of the week by announcing that the executive editor, Sally Buzbee, would be departing and one of his former lieutenants from his time as editor of the UK’s Daily Telegraph, Robert Winnett, will take the helm after the US election.

Lewis – brought in to revive the fortunes of the Post, which has seen sharp drops in readership and revenue – was already under scrutiny before this surprise appointment.

Yes, of course, there’s some of that bleedin’ foreigners comin’ over ‘ere and takin’ our jobs. Or whatever the American argot for that would be.

But this is the root of it:

As a pivotal US election looms, those anxieties are now blending with worry about whether something like what happened at the Daily Telegraph could be in store for the Post. A trusted paper once considered on the centre-right of politics, the Telegraph has tacked ever further to the fringes in recent years, embracing populist-leaning leaders and their ideas. These changes occurred after the departure of Lewis, but while Winnett was in a key role.

…..

One Post journalist said: “At the Washington Post, the publisher and CEO are forbidden from directing content in any way. That seems to be the standard in the UK, where some papers seem to be used as personal vendetta machines.”

….

Media observers and multiple former Telegraph journalists told the Guardian how it had moved away from its traditional middle-of-the-road conservatism to a far harder, often rightwing populist-leaning paper.

That worry is that there will be a “we’re a right wing paper now” at the WaPo. Or even populist and all that. Which is anathema to the journalistic classes in the US. It’s an overwhelmingly Democratic, woke and even progressive profession. That they even call it a profession is a bad idea (One Fleet St veteran, when I first started writing, insisted to me it was a craft, something learnt by doing, not even a trade let alone a profession to be taught in universities).

For here’s the rough background. Given geography we got, as I’ve said before:

Before Y2K American newspapers were segmented along geographic lines. The size of the country, the lack of a long distance passenger railroad network, meant that this was just so. If you’re printing a daily paper then you’ve got to deliver it daily. On the day it’s meant to refer to as well. If Chicago is 1,100 miles (no, I’ve not looked it up but that’s within an order of magnitude of being right, which is better than many newspapers manage with numbers) from New Orleans then the same newspaper is going to find it difficult to print and deliver to both markets. Add in the fact that trains take a week to traverse that distance, passenger trains - anyone who has ever travelled Amtrak will say it feels that long at least - included.

You could not and therefore did not have national newspaper (USA Today, with satellite printing plants, was an attempt to deal with this and slightly earlier than our cut off date but doesn’t change the basic story) distributions. What you had was a series of local and regional monopolies. Each one centred on a large population centre and serving the area around it that could be reasonably reached by truck overnight. Chicago and Cincinnnati, not 1,100 miles away from each other, did have entirely different newspapers.

The UK has been a national newspaper market since before WWI. Therefore we can look to the UK market to see what’ll happen to the US one now that geography is removed as a constraint:

America just isn’t going to support 100 major newspapers all trying to do the national news. That means that all those journos who used to repeat the same stories from their owned bureaux to the local monopoly are simply shit out of luck. Exactly what is in fact happening.

The old model is dead, 100 versions of the same old worldview just won’t do it. Because that old model depended upon that series of local monopolies. Which means that, a century later, the American newspaper market is going to be like the British one. Nicely described in this Yes Prime Minister clip. The point of which is that the market is not divided by geography at all. It’s divided by socioeconomic classes and the presumed interests of each of them.

Instead of having the Bay Area nuts and bolts paper, the LA nuts and bolts paper, we now have “Hexaform Rotational Securing Devices” for the professional and posh classes and for those who get their hands dirty and do stuff the more populist “Nuts!”.

That’s the way that American journalism is going to end up simply because that’s what the economic pressures are and there’s no resisting those. Differentiation can no longer be about geographic areas when reporting national and international news. Therefore that differentiation is going to go away. Yes, this will mean the death of many storied regional titles. What will replace it is some dozen or so - say - titles differentiating in language used, political viewpoint and socioeconomic distinctions in potential readership.

The Washington Post, as a left liberal and sourced from Washington DC newspaper, but the same as all the other left liberal newspapers, simply isn’t going to survive.

Exactly the same thing is also going to be true of all those other big city newspapers. There’s simply not the room for them. The market doesn’t need, doesn’t want, 50 or 100 filtrations of the same news set through the same worldview under that 50 or 100 titles. It will support 10 or a dozen different filtrations of that same news set through different worldviews and different variations of language. There’s going to be a right of centre top nobs paper, as there is already on the left with the NYT (our Guardian). There will be the financial paper, the WSJ (our FT). There will be mid-market rights and lefts (Mail, Express, and, umm, can’t think of our lefty one there) and tabloids of right and left (Sun, Mirror). Maybe a few more variations given the 380 million people - possibly a Spanish language for example.

But that past position of the WaPo - left liberal *but from Wash DC* - isn’t going to last. Titles that do last will be those that get with the socioeconomic niches that have now replaced the geographic.

Which is what has the American journos so pissed of course. They’re no longer working in an economic and social monoculture. Worse, those who remain in work are going to have to go out and chase the prejudices of their readership rather than announce, from on high, how everyone should be thinking.