I don’t really have anything against the Graham family and I believe that they have truly earned the intense loyalty of Washington Post employees and veterans. I understand the sadness people are feeling over the sale of the Post to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com. I do.
But these people need to understand how truly awful the Washington Post has been for decades now. To properly document the atrocities committed by the Post would take up an entire career, but you can get a taste just by opening up the opinion page any day of the week.
But rather than even get into the details of how the paper operates, perhaps it would be better to just stipulate that the Post reflects the common wisdom and values of the upper crust of Georgetown society, and that that society has been letting America down since at least the moment that LBJ was sworn in on Air Force One.
We have been failed by our leaders repeatedly, and we have come to have contempt for them, and definitely not for the reasons Sally Quinn imagines. They see themselves as honorable, and permanent, and impervious to whatever ideology is ascendent in town at any particular time.
The television parallel of the Post is CNN, which similarly employs people for life without regard for performance and takes an agnostic stance on which side of any argument has more merit, instead focusing on the dispute itself. Ever since Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire with hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, it’s been clear that this kind of politics-as-show agnosticism is the worst kind of hackery and that it’s hurting the country. Mr. Stewart actually single-handedly killed Crossfire (at least, he did for a number of years) by simply shining an honest light on what they did and why it sucked.
This kind of faux-objectivity just creates a vapid din that enables the weaponization of the county’s stupidity. It’s an endless he said/she said, where the point is not the truth or value but the fact that an argument is taking place. It’s much more entertainment than news. And, worse, the debate is so narrowed and constricted that no opinion can be allowed to exist if it doesn’t lie somewhere between what Mary Matalin thinks and what her husband James Carville thinks. And they’re both wrong, about everything.
That’s what the Washington Establishment is and has been for decades now, and it makes ordinary Americans want to puke. If Jeff Bezos can do something to improve matters, that will be great. But he can’t do it unless he comes in with some heavy equipment and just razes the place.