MARK JUDGE: The Crisis at the WaPo Has a Remedy.
The Devil’s Triangle was not reviewed in The Washington Post. I was not contacted for a profile, even though the Post had spent 2018 hunting me down, going through my high school yearbook, and cross-examining everyone I ever dated. Finally, Kathleen Parker had enough. Yet even after her rebuke to her own colleagues, The Washington Post would not touch my book,
I relive all of this because the Post has just published a massive deep dive in its new leadership and its continual financial woes. Without getting into the deep weeds of the story here are the basics: the Post has new British leadership because owner Jeff Bezos is tired of burning through $100 million a year to prop up left-wing propaganda that nobody reads. The Post staff are not happy about the new editors.
This is the same staff that hunted me like an animal and now crud [sic—Ed] as if my revelatory, damning book does not exist.
Would Woodward and Bernstein ignore The Devil’s Triangle? They would not. If would be unthinkable to them.
Do I want to sell books? Of course. Do I tend to relive the trauma of 2018 to the point where friends are telling me to move on? I do. I also have survived after an ordeal that kills most people via a GoFundMe. I take all the criticism and try to honestly reflect on it.
That’s the second benchmark I’ve seen laid down for measuring if there will be any actual change at the WaPo. This was the first:
The obvious litmus test is the decision about Taylor Lorenz. If they are serious, the new management will immediately let her go; if they are not, they will find an excuse to keep her on.
Either way, it's a great test case. We will see if losing half your audience and $77… https://t.co/z6EvAuJJ2Q
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 3, 2024
I’d love to be wrong, but I’m doubtful either will happen.
UPDATE: Inmates are running the newsroom asylums.
Perhaps it simply is a case of foreign British editors coming into American newsrooms without the perspective of race and gender narratives. Both Will Lewis of the Washington Post and Emma Tucker of the Wall Street Journal are of British origin (through no fault of their own); perhaps they were hired specifically to quash these petulant rebellions within their own establishments, obsessed with race-based coverage of every newsworthy event under the sun.
One thing remains, however, that until that day comes, these newsrooms will still be run like liberal arts college campuses. There might even be a few tent encampments in the main lobby of the buildings. If the worst thing Tucker and Lewis are accused of is being out of touch with what their inmates demand, then perhaps the answer is not to cater, cave and apologize. Perhaps the answer is to stand firm — and tell them no.
As Kurt Schlichter tweeted in 2018 when the crybully staffers at the Atlantic melted down when Kevin Williamson was hired and Jeffrey Goldberg demonstrated that the inmates were running his asylum, too:
Thus foreshadowing “The Atlantic’s Nervous Breakdown,” and the nervous breakdown of much of the rest of the MSM.