Staffers quit and 200,000 subscribers cancel after WaPo says its role is to report the news

- Official slogan of The Washington Post

The venerable Washington Post may or may not have been a force for good, but it certainly was great.

They brought down Richard Nixon for crimes that were only modest by today’s inflated standards but serious at the time. They helped lose the Vietnam War – a war that was criminal, or just, depending on your view of history, but the losing of which was certainly a tragedy for the conquered South Vietnamese and most of the rest of the world.

They won the Pulitzer Prize 76 times, and many of those times were back when the Prize rewarded true excellence.

They were everywhere. Few newspapers today bear the expense of foreign bureaus; the Post still has a couple dozen.

For most of their century-and-a-half of existence, they tried to report the news, and they succeeded. It’s certainly true that toward the end of the 20^th century they focused on news that made Democrats look good and Republicans look bad (such as the Watergate story) but, still, it was news. It was factual. It was true. It was important.

Given their mission to report facts, the Post generally refused to endorse particular political candidates. Individual opinion columnists of course expressed their support for candidates of their choosing, but the Board of Editors did not endorse those candidates, at least not explicitly.

Only relatively recently, in 1976, did they begin routine endorsements. At that time, they were at the height of their power and could afford whatever ill will their endorsements generated among some readers and staff.

Their endorsements were almost always of Democrats: Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, and so on. It was predictable.

There are several problems with predictable endorsements. The first is that they have no persuasive power. If the Post always endorses the Democrat, then who is going to be persuaded by their endorsement of the Democrat this time?

The second problem is that endorsements predictably favoring one political party risk the reputation of the newspaper as an objective source of news. Readers surmise that the people working at the newspaper are members of that political party. If everyone at the newspaper is of one political party, are they really able to see and report the news objectively?

The third problem – related to the second – is that being predictably in favor of one political party tends to forfeit readers who favor the other political party. This problem has become more acute lately, as the internet has fragmented consumers of news into political parties and interest groups. Consumers today tend to get their news from sites that spin it the way they like, and avoid getting their news from sites that don’t.

That’s a flaw in consumerism, but it’s the reality of human nature.

That means a newspaper like the Post forfeits much of its Republican readers by getting a reputation for being a Democrat newspaper.

Finally, in view of all those reasons, one-sided endorsements are at cross purposes with professional journalism. Real journalists (as opposed to opinion hacks like me) simply report; they don’t opine.

This year, the Post announced that it is “going back to its roots” (their phrase) by not making an endorsement in the presidential election. It’s not clear whether their news page, too, will become more balanced, but owner Jeff Bezos made noises in that direction.

Maybe Bezos is making his decision on the basis of money, not ethics. But I’ll still take it. The two are usually not at odds.

Meanwhile, many Post staffers have quit in protest (good luck to them in finding a newspaper job) and over 200,000 subscribers have canceled. That fact tells a lot about what those quitters and cancelers think a newspaper’s role should be.

They think a newspaper’s role should be to tell subscribers which political opinion is “right.” More specifically, the newspaper should tell people that the “right” opinion is the Democrat one.

What’s curious, however, is that subscribers who pay for the Post are nearly always Democrats already, because they like the Democrat spin that they see at the Post. Therefore, the Post endorsements have no effective purpose.

Moreover, the quitters and cancelers at the Post know that. They know that they’re preaching to the choir (though they certainly would not use that particular analogy).

So why do they do it? Why do the Post quitters and cancelers insist on converting hard-core Democrats into . . .  hard-core Democrats?  

The answer is that they aren’t truly trying to convert anyone. Rather, they’re just flying their Democrat flag. It’s their little virtue-signaling routine.

That’s nice. But it’s not journalism.

Whatever Bezos’ motives, let’s hope he, and the owner of the LA Times who similarly refused to make an endorsement this year, start a trend away from political activism and back to professional journalism.

In that effort, it wouldn’t hurt to hire a few Republicans for a change.