It is The Washington Post’s
right, of course, to stand for whatever it and its owner wish it to stand for.
If the owner of this magazine woke up tomorrow and decided that Murray Rothbard
was right about everything and The New Republic was henceforth going to
follow the Cato Institute line on all matters, that would be his right, and I’d
ungrudgingly go look for new employment. That’s how this business works.
So this is not a liberal whine that
the Post “ought” to be liberal, although it is worth pointing out that (a)
this shift effectively defenestrates 50 or 60 years of proud history, (b) a
conservative stance puts the paper in a very bad odor indeed with respect to
the city it purports to serve, and (c) the paper has bled enormous polemical
talent over the last couple of years: Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, Ruth
Marcus, Dana Milbank (still at the paper but no longer a columnist), and not
least Greg Sargent and Perry Bacon, about whom I’m delighted to say that the Post’s
loss is TNR’s gain. (Here’s a bonus fun fact: No matter how hard the Post
swings in this reactionary rightward direction, The Wall Street Journal got
there first, and they do it better.)
My point rather is that liberals,
especially those of the multimillionaire and billionaire variety, need to pay
close attention to this phenomenon. The nation’s capital is now served by two
editorially conservative newspapers: the Post and the Unification
Church’s Washington Times, still going … well, one can’t quite say
“strong.” I never hear anyone talk about it or see someone link to one of its
stories or columns on social media. Never. I realize they’re not exactly my
crowd, but this wasn’t always the case—it seemed to me that during the Reagan
and Bush 43 eras, the Times mattered more than it does now. There’s also
arguably a third, The Washington Examiner. It’s now online only, but
it’s a tabloid newspaper in its DNA, and very conservative.
