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.
Really well said, Booman. I used to marvel at how atrocious the Washington Post editorial page was in the early 80s, when I was going to college in Baltimore and very much within its sphere of influence (pre-internet, when newspapers had a larger regional than national reach). Back then, the rest of the paper was still pretty good. But the editorial page would print screeds on environmentalism written by the CEO of Monsanto (and the like). It was already a joke.
Good point of view. Nice share 🙂 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mokoolapps.kidspuzzles
Not that I disagree, but why would he buy it (and spend $250 million of his own money) if he wasn’t planning on keeping at least some of it in place? Is the name alone really worth that much? He could have started his own website, luring away writers, and let it slowly gain traction into profitability the same way he did with Amazon. (Let’s face it, the days of actual newsprint are numbered.)
I was listening to a radio program yesterday in which someone was saying that Warren Buffet is buying up small-market newspapers, which he believes will have a continuing niche.
His rationale is that the kind of “news” that appears in a major paper is old by the time it’s printed and distributed. One can get political analysis, job ads, sports scores, stock price and everything else online — faster and cheaper than by purchasing fish wrap. However, small town news isn’t covered by blogs. If you want to hear how your neighbor’s son, the high school quarterback, did the other night, the local paper is helpful. If you want to keep track of which of your friends and acquaintance have died, read the obit. Local store sales, local political issues are all best covered by newspaper.
So those are the ones he sees as having a future.
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Warren Buffett and his interest in the Washington Post.
And shagging Katherine Graham was an added perq.
Then there was that Blue Chip Stamps dud. But See’s Candies, a yum.
Well spoken. I feel similarly. Mahalo.
It seems that progressives have a lot in common with Tea-partiers at least as far as contempt for the Washington establishment is concerned. Partly this is driven by economic change: most real change, for good or ill, has been driven by Wall Street and Silicon Valley for decades whilst the Georgetown elite have delivered not even a semblance of government or administrative competence, never mind ground breaking ideas as to how governance can be improved.
If there is a case to be made for an elite – any elite – it can only be grounded on administrative competence, academic excellence or political/legal skills. SCOTUS has been a sad joke. Congress barely functions at all. The Fed appears to have overcome it’s fascination with neo-liberal market deregulation, but that is about as far as it goes. The failure of the fourth estate has perhaps been the most egregious of all.
The Year of Living Stupidly – NYTimes.com
Very well-made, well-stated argument.
I wish it were just the Wapo and CNN, but this is pretty much the state of “journalism” throughout most of the MSM.
“that society has been letting America down since at least the moment that LBJ was sworn in on Air Force One.”
You certainly nailed that one, bro.
I like your comments about objectivity.
In my view “objectivity” is a fantasy. Every human has life experiences, values, perspective and no one person can truly understand everyone else life experience, values and perspective.
And our inherent subjectivity shows up not in only how we approach a particular story, but which stories we choose to examine.
The best we can do is know ourselves, provide a disclaimer, let readers know the perspective we’re coming from, then attempt to portray the facts as best we can.
“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.”
Exactly.
I first came to understand this from reading Jay Rosen. Everything he writes is gold.
http://pressthink.org/
I’d be amazed if Jeff Bezos did anything to change this. That would require that he actually cares about a healthy fourth estate and an informed public rather than owning a major trophy in America’s center of political power.
Documenting the Post’s atrocities boils down to their failure to document the atrocities as the Village took the US government over the edge.
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Business Insider: It’s fun and Bezos will take it into the digital age – Here’s Why I Think Jeff Bezos Bought The Washington Post.
As a guy who lives down the street (metaphorically) from Bezos, it’s been interesting to read the strikingly unimaginative national takes on why he might want the Post. Bezos isn’t about ego or prestige; he’s about making money, big money, Gates-type money, by creating monopolies everyone has to use. Bezos could not care less about the Village. He cares about beating Google and Apple, about having monopolies on platforms and content. He’s thinking globally, and he’s thinking much, much bigger than Sally Quinn’s fucking parties. In this way his purchase cannot but be a good thing.
I suspect there’s a larger danger, and because I’m not as smart as a guy like Bezos, I don’t know what it is yet. I don’t know whether he wants to influence regulatory decisions, or get a monopoly on our news from the federal government, or what. But I guarantee it’s not the petty, pinched, sclerotic concerns that dominate the Village. Our here in the hinterlands we got bored with that shit a long time ago and moved on with the world.
To spell it out as simply as possible: Bezos lives 3,000 miles from Washington, D.C. Out here we think this is an excellent thing.
I actually hadn’t thought of it in these terms before, but there does seem to be something about being far removed from the DC-NYC axis that encourages creativity. Apple: Bay Area. Microsoft: Seattle. Google: Bay Area. Amazon: Seattle. Those four companies now pretty much dominate how we connect with the world, in a way that makes local newspapers and national networks look like small change.
Maybe it’s that across our water is the four billion people of Asia, not the 700 million of Europe. People like Bezos are thinking at a different scale even from Wall Street, and they make people like Quinn as relevant to the state of the world as your average snooty middle-school cheerleader.
I am not happy about this b/c of how amazon has functioned. what about his undercutting all other booksellers? that does not bode well imo.
I’m with ya – I really, really dislike Amazon for that reason alone, though there are others. And friends of mine who’ve worked there have almost always not had good experiences.
But my point here is that Bezos is playing on a much larger field than the Style section. He’s the kind of guy who thinks in terms like “Hey, let’s put every independent bookseller out of business!”
The money might be in breaking Google’s monopoly on web-based advertising, something that no doubt has hampered the WaPo online transition.
Not an original ideas wrt this deal, but it would create a separate revenue stream from the print paper. Also, his pitch about the delivery being key to the print paper might have a bit of e-paper involved in it. I imagine that some sort of value chain that involves Kindle might be a part of it as well.
On this just SWAGs.
The money might be in breaking Google’s monopoly on web-based advertising, …
I know a lot of people here don’t like her but Jane Hamsher thinks that Bezos is going to have to take the fight to Google .. if he ever expects to make decent money on his WaPo investment.
“the weaponization of the county’s stupidity”
That is the funniest phrase I’ve read in a long time.
Great post and wonderful prose.
That “society” has always been a special interest group. If at particular points in the history of the USA, its interests have coincided broadly with America, that was as accidental as an America witch generally is a collection of special interests as well.
As for the DC national press, it has generally function as a handmaiden of the “society.” Occasionally, a few reporters/editors/owners exhibit a conscience and actually perform like the fourth estate. But what were they printing when Woodrow Wilson was throwing Eugene Debs in prison and the communist witch-hunts that began in Congress in the late 1930s and lasted for almost two decades?
The problem is that the alternative is MSNBC, where you will get 2 or 3 people who basically agree on everything, and who mostly say things you could have anticipated if you understand their politics. There is little point in listening to someone tell you what you already know, even if you agree with it. It is also dangerously narrowing. I prefer the CNN approach or presenting both sides, but their sides are too weighted in the middle (they need to represent somewhat extreme views on both sides as parts of the debate. Part of their ratings problem is that virtually no one is actually in the middle anymore, unless they are just uninterested in politics at all), and they need to focus more on the substance of the issues. I don’t believe one should trump up complaints about the left, just to balance legitimate ones about the right (nor vice versa, but that is not a situation that often arises), but I also do not accept a debate that accepts only liberal voices, and there is a serious danger of having no check on potentially distorted views because, on MSNBC, you are in a echo chamber. I appreciate that some of the MSNBC shows will get into more substance on the news, but I am tired of hearing 3 people all say the same thing.
An example: I just saw Lawrence. He was doing a segment on Obama’s statement regarding Russia and had a non-standard guest (rather than one from the stock MSNBC pool), who was a journalist with a Russia specialty. The other two guests were Ari Melber and Krystal Ball, MSNBC staff. The Russia specialist started to make an argument that the downing of Morales
‘ plane essentially forced Russia to grant Snowden asylum. Now that’s interesting. Because what the US allies did was entirely outside international norms, even those applied to defectors during the Cold War? It seems she was on the verge of making an interesting, subtle, and informed argument. But Lawrence shouted her down insisting that the crude fact of Russian physical control of the situation invalidated any more political notion of “causation” that could include constraints other than physical force on political actors. He would never accept an analysis of American politics that ruled out any accounts of choice that were not reducible to physical coercion, but he shouted down the woman and did not let her make fer argument. He was arguing for a stupid model of political causation, and shouting down what was potentially a sophisticated one. It could have been Bill O’Reilly.
That’s two killer posts in a week, Boo.
I think Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh would totally agree with your characterization of the Post. Spoken like a true neo-conservative.