PAUL MIRENGOFF: Washington Post’s new chief to staff: “Your audience has halved; people are not reading your stuff.”

More than half a century ago, ABC Sports assigned Howard Cosell, the Stephen A. Smith of his day, to be part of the broadcast team for its brand-new Monday Night Football program. A family friend and football fanatic thought Cosell was ruining the broadcasts and complained to ABC. The response? We’re inundated with complaints. Cosell will be gone soon.

But ABC kept Cosell and Monday Night Football flourished. So began the movement to color commentators who make the games about themselves. Bill Walton was the reductio ad absurdum of that unfortunate development.

This episode in media history came to mind when I read that the Washington Post’s new CEO and publisher, William Lewis, told Post staffers that the paper needs a fast turnaround because it’s losing huge amounts of money ($77 million in the past year) and has lost half of its audience.

There are similarities between the two episodes. In both cases, a media mainstay has bucked the desire of a big chunk of its audience — ABC by imposing a blowhard on football fans; the Post by eschewing objective journalism and becoming a hyper-partisan left-liberal organ. In both cases, the media mainstay didn’t yield to consumer pressure. ABC stuck with Cosell. The Post has persisted with its badly slanted journalism.

But there’s also a big difference. ABC got away with, and indeed prospered from, its decision to stick with Cosell. The Post, as its CEO admits, is suffering.

Sports fans, it seems, are willing to tolerate annoying announcers in order to watch the games they love. News consumers have no incentive to tolerate organs that openly favor ideologies they don’t like.

It’s true, of course, that there are important reasons for the Post’s woes in addition to its decision to discard objectivity in reporting. The media landscape has changed to the detriment of all newspapers.

But when a large bloc of longtime readers who don’t share the Post’s biases becomes too disgusted with a paper to keep reading it, that’s a big problem for the paper.

Read the whole thing, though I’m not sure if Howard Cosell is the most appropriate angle to frame the Post’s myriad woes. In the last decade of mass media, when there still only three commercial television networks, Roone Arledge’s decision to have three announcers in the booth, one of them being Cosell, helped to make Monday Night Football a ratings powerhouse for ABC, the first step in turning that network from a perennial third-place loser into, beginning in 1976, the number one watched channel in America for about the next five years.

Cosell became so big that in 1975, the network had the staggeringly ill-advised idea to build a weekend variety show around him, which is why for its first couple of seasons, what we now call Saturday Night Live was simply “NBC’s Saturday Night.” The classic “Not Ready for Primetime Players” tag about the show’s original cast was invented by original-SNL writer Herb Sargent to lampoon Cosell’s troupe being dubbed the “Primetime Players.”

Cosell was also smart enough to parody himself and ride the gravy train. He’d complain bitterly about “the jockocracy” of athletes turned sportscasters whom he believed lacked his own skills. And then he’d eagerly host every ridiculous Battle of the Network Stars episode that ABC wanted to air. Given how wokeness kills comedy, it’s difficult to imagine someone having the same mercurial talent that Cosell had – at least before it all came crashing down for him, and ABC sentenced him to television Siberia for his last years in a variety of backwater shows.

Because there are now so many sports-themed TV channels and Websites, it’s likely impossible for someone to become as dominant a figure in the media as Cosell was in the 1970s — though I’m sure every sportswriter at the Post thinks he’ll be the next celebrity sports announcer.

But Mirengoff is likely right that “even if Trump loses, the Post won’t reform. Its hyper-partisan reporters will continue on their current path,” based on this article at the Wrap: Washington Post Publisher Pitches His ‘Leadership’ and ‘Humility,’ Denies Pressuring Editor to Drop Story.

The Washington Post’s new publisher, Will Lewis, sent a conciliatory memo to staff Friday (shared with TheWrap) after Lewis sparked deep concerns from both inside and outside his newsroom this week with announcements of leadership changes and a restructuring of the newsroom. The Post also issued a statement disputing some of the coverage from other outlets it’s received this week.

The statement also defends Lewis from criticism of his journalistic integrity, noting, “As a highly experienced Publisher, and an ex Editor and Editor-in-Chief, William is very clear about the lines that should not be crossed and his track record attests to that.”

Whether that is the case will likely remain in dispute following NPR reporting this week how Lewis offered its media reporter David Folkenflik an exclusive interview in order to spike a story about Lewis’ involvement in the United Kingdom’s phone hacking scandal.

“In some quieter moments this week, I have been reflecting on leadership styles, trust and humility,” Lewis wrote in his own statement, before going on to write about broad ideals including leadership, authenticity and integrity.

He shared two emails he’d received from colleagues this week, with one slightly critical but kindly supportive, while the other expressed complete support despite the “disenchantment” of others.

The executive then got to the point, writing, “So, time for some humility from me. I need to improve how well I listen and how well I communicate so that we all agree more clearly where urgent improvements are needed and why.”

I hope this is a brilliant case of misdirection on Lewis’s part. Because otherwise, this sounds like more of the same therapeutic language that doomed Dean Baquet and other editors dealing with their crybully staffs in 2020.

Further thoughts on the collapse of the Post, its efforts to rebuild, how wokeness guarantees a boring newspaper, and the role of the MSM as the Democrats’ palace guard at the Commentary podcast from John Podhoretz, Eli Lake, Abe Greenwald, and Seth Mandel.