"Your Washington Post subscription has been canceled"
I copied the title of this column from the subject line of an email that landed in my inbox yesterday. It is not quite clear why an organization that presumably views itself as upholding the highest standards of English usage chose the passive voice -- OK, maybe this was a "retention" subcontractor -- but to be clear, my Washington Post subscription was canceled by me. I did it.
On the other hand, at least the body of the email was coherent and clear: "We hope you’ll reconsider the value of the necessary and important work our journalists do to keep citizens informed. Absolutely nothing has changed about that. In fact, it’s more important than ever." Thanks, but no.
But is this not a very old story? Back when Post overlord Jeff Bezos forced his editorial board to kill their planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for President last Fall, there was a rush to the exits as an estimated 300,000 people canceled their subscriptions. That betrayal of the standards of independent journalism was followed earlier this year by Bezos's announcement that his op-ed pages would only print columns that supported "personal liberties and free markets" (a formulation that I mocked in a Dorf on Law column in March), which apparently cost them another 75,000 subscribers.
Amusingly, the NPR story from which I drew the circulation estimates above adds this:
The Post has aggressively wooed new subscribers to replace them, boosting circulation by 400,000, often at highly discounted rates, according to a Post executive. (The executive spoke on condition of anonymity because the Post does not release circulation figures.)
Even so, there is broad consensus inside the Post that without Bezos' decisions, the paper would be up hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers from where it was before the election. Instead, the numbers NPR has been able to obtain indicate a net loss of a couple hundred thousand subscribers.
That story's data indirectly suggest that there were something like 2.5 million Post subscribers back in February. And now there are 2,499,999. But again, why now? The boring answer is that my subscription was up for renewal, and I chose not to renew. The more interesting answer is that I had been thinking about this for some time, and although I needed something to force me to make a decision, it had become clear to me that Bezos is not the fundamental problem with that newspaper. Moreover, facing the renewal deadline finally caused me to think about what I would do to replace my daily intake of Post content, which was itself a healthy exercise.
Frequent readers of Dorf on Law will have noted over the years that a large amount of my commentary is devoted to criticism of the media, in particular their infuriating habits like bothsidesism (and a variant thereof that I once called "bothfringesism") combined with their obsessive devotion to setting and aggressively policing what Noam Chomsky long ago called "The Bounds of Thinkable Thought." And honestly, one of the reasons that I wavered on the question of renewing my Post subscription is that it has been the gift that keeps on giving, providing exasperation-fueled content for my online writing.
In my March Dorf on Law column that I mentioned above, I argued that Bezos was doing the world a favor by making it unmistakably obvious that what had long been a rather atrocious op-ed page was not even going to pretend anymore. Not that the content itself would be noticeably different going forward, mind you. Just two weeks ago, the editorial board decided to opine on Canada-US trade after Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberals drubbed the Conservatives and their leader Pierre Poilievre, who had until very recently seemed likely to win national elections in a rout.
So what did the editors write about Carney? "Both he and Trump know how to talk tough but then sit down to negotiate mutually beneficial deals." [Note: I will not provide the link, because I do not want to encourage readers to go to that paid site. Obviously.] When I read those words, I immediately copied them into a note to myself with the subject line: "Yeah, right!" Trump knows how to sit down and negotiate mutually beneficial deals? Citation, please! This is a man who clearly is incapable of understanding what "mutually beneficial" even means, especially in the context of international trade, where he is nothing more than a crude mercantilist.
It might be tempting to emphasize that this bit of sane-washing was written by the April version of the editorial board, which includes only those cowards who did not join in the the Bezos-triggered "personal liberties and free markets" resignations, along with anyone who somehow chose to replace the departed editors. But that board has been so bad about so many things for so long that it is impossible to imagine that the previous iterations of the board would have been any less craven in this context.
Beyond the editorial board itself, I have written too many times to count about their ridiculous lineup of regular opinion columnists to bother doing so again here. I do consider it ominous that the columnist I once dubbed "the Queen of the Neoliberals" has now become a regular presence on MSNBC, but oh well. I will also remind readers that The Post's fact-checker did not even bother to check facts when he decided to attack Joe Biden's completely factual statement about the regressive nature of the US tax system. And on the "news side," their coverage is about as conventional as conventional can be.
None of this is to deny that there has been some great work by Post reporters over the years. Indeed, when I learned in the mid-2010's that Bezos had brought a once-great paper back to life, I was often pleasantly surprised by how good their work could be. At some point, however, the bad more than outweighed the good. And honestly, The New York Times simply does everything that its rival does, but almost always better or at least not as bad. It took me a long time to get here, but I now understand that any added value from reading the US's secondary mainstream news purveyor is so small as to amount to a rounding error.
In short, there is good reason to remain aware of what the conventional wisdom is in the US, but that non-wisdom is so conventional that it becomes redundant. Indeed, even within either The Times or The Post alone, there is mind-numbing repetition. One needed to go, and the choice to jettison The Post was an easy one.
What are the alternatives? There are the obvious "public intellectual" magazines along the lines of The Atlantic, Slate, and so on. By pure coincidence, I came across an intreesting piece this morning that Salon published last summer. There, a writer described the dire state of US media coverage, urging then-President Biden to aggressively push to use a Supreme Court decision to break up tech/media monopolies. That piece excoriated the Reagan Administration for starting us down the path to damnation, and it included nuggets like this: "Gannett should be forced to sell off most of its newspapers and at the same time be brought into the public square and flogged for pretending to publish journalism." (Interestingly, the author did not include any examples from The Post, for whatever reason.)
But surely a good news diet needs more than one major newspaper to be nutritious, right? Actually yes, and because the Times/Post stew was not in any way balanced, it is especially important to choose wisely. Now that I am no longer living in the US, an international source seemed worth finding, and for now I have landed on the UK's The Guardian. That paper has the advantage for readers of not sitting behind paywalls, relying instead on voluntary donations from readers and an endowed trust that makes a Bezos-like ideological takeover highly unlikely.
That choice might end up being disappointing, in which case I will of course move on. The essential point here, however, is that I would even be better off reading nothing to replace The Post than I would be by continuing to allow it to invade my brain with its self-important blather. Moreover, for those who think that voting with one's dollars is important (and I am one of those people), it can feel very good to have done what is needed to receive an email saying that "[y]our Washington Post subscription has been canceled." Aaaahhhhh.
-- Neil H. Buchanan