I have some fairly simple advice for Jeff Bezos. Fire all of upper management and the entire editorial board and all its contributors. Keep your bloggers, since they are providing the best opinion content that the Washington Post produces, but get rid of Krauthammer and Will and Ignatius and Cohen and Thiessen and Gerson and Parker. Don’t even stop with the right-wing hacks. Let Eugene Robinson and Colbert King and E.J. Dionne find new work, too. Just clean house.
What you need is intelligence, freshness, energy, and (most of all) irreverence. If you follow my advice, you will absolutely appall Washington society, which will cause them to read your paper more religiously than they have ever read it before. The best writing about Washington has always been done by people who don’t spend much time there and don’t give a shit about hurt feelings, access to sources, or invitations to the next big happening in town. The problem with the Post is that everyone who works there seems afraid to label the elites of Washington as the shit-heels that they are. Anything that might hurt Sally Quinn’s feelings is muted. Everyone has to pretend that David Broder isn’t (wasn’t) a senile gas-bag. Enough!
The only good moment the press has had in DC in the last decade was when, at the White House Correspondents Dinner a few years ago, Stephen Colbert held up a mirror to their faces and they were forced to recoil in horror.
Off with all their careers!
And honesty. If you discover that a columnist is consistently dishonest, stop publishing them. If this means that you can’t find a right-leaning columnist to publish, so be it. Make your creed “no bullshit.” Tell your editors that you’ll be calling them for an explanation if you find one obviously bad-faith distortion of fact in any columns. Don’t facilitate the spin-wars in any way. If you discover that reality has a strong left-wing bias, don’t worry about it. The more the right hates you, the more they’ll link to your articles.
Go young. Young people know how to use the internet and their worldview is by definition the cutting edge. Anyone old enough to vote when the Iraq War started who wasn’t calling bullshit should be suspect. Anyone complicit in any way with the Bush administration should be gone. Start over. Fresh.
Come in and take a dump on everyone and everything. Your papers will sell like hotcakes and you’ll be doing something truly patriotic.
Also, buy CNN and follow the same recipe.
