The Washington Post Is Taking a Dive
Jeff Bezos’s reign of error at the venerable newspaper has wrecked subscriber trust—and there’s no reason to believe it will rebound anytime soon.
In his most recent piece documenting the slow and steady rise of the right-wing media Wurlitzer and its impact on the 2024 election, TNR editor Michael Tomasky made a dire prediction. “I predict Sinclair or the News Corp. will own The Washington Post one day,” he warned. “Maybe sooner than we think.” It’s a sad thing to say about the hometown newspaper that gave me my first job (I was 13 and was a paperboy), but the paper has the stench of a distressed asset these days. In the tumultuous period that followed the paper’s decision to spike its endorsement of Kamala Harris, it lost 250,000 subscribers—10 percent of its readership.
