Washington Post Begins Layoffs
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A ton of people canceled their subscriptions right after Bezos refused to have an endorsement. Local message boards filled up with employees claiming that the actual news reporting was still being done well and not to cancel just because the op-eds were now explicitly partisan. They're probably right, but the op-ed pages represent the accumulated wisdom of journalists spending decades in the career, and having that wiped out lost a lot of the paper's value to the people who used to read it daily.
(A comment I saw: "You have to understand, Bezos is down to his last $250 billion.")
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-sad-and-self-inflicted-decl...
Notably in Trump I the WaPo catches up to The New York Times in influence and in Trump II it falls off.
They can't or won't call out racism and extreme action by the Trump administration because they'd forfeit their right to that faux objectivity. Perhaps they'll report the facts, but their unwillingness to call something what it is makes that thing appear to be acceptable.
(2) Many people are not excited about threats to "Democracy" because they see it is for "them", see
https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
why care about norm violations if those norms are unjust and lead to what looks like bad outcomes (and certainly capital-D Democrats seem to care less about outcomes than about following broken processes and never annoying donors)
(3) I was really burned out by talk of "fascism" ten years ago. Like yeah, Donald Trump is definitely flirting with it today but after years of left-wing "anti-fascists" who hate fascism but love the footwear, who will other with with the worst of them and seem to be jealous, who call Keir Starmer a fascist, who call your local police chief a fascist, I think it is a magic spell to bring fascism into the world but if you have a dialectical theory in which you get meaning out of saying you fight fascism maybe that's what you secretly want.
Because telling your buddy that they don't know what they are talking about is the kindergartner's^W^W rationalist way of building solidarity /s :)
Strangely, a variant of the same stance works for "fascists" ;) I think it's bc they have fewer hangups --re: dialectics-- about looking like a tool (vs leftist "rationalists")?
>jealous
Ps: just belatedly realized I was expected to weave peptalk about "envy" into "enby"