Some may not realize it, but despite its long-standing reputation as a newspaper that fearlessly defends the truth, The Washington Post has caught a virus in the woke minds that is putting what’s left of its reputation and revenue at risk.
As I point out in my upcoming book titled “Go Woke, Go Broke,” corporations that spread left-wing dogma (like Budweiser, Target, Disney, and struggling legacy media companies) have suffered from an American consumer unwillingness to display morality when drinking beer, buying clothes, or watching the news.
The Washington Post went there too.
If you know how to read a balance sheet, it suffers existential consequences.
The man hired to clean up the mess isn’t a seasoned turnaround specialist, but the newspaper’s rookie publisher, a veteran, ink-smeared thug named Will Lewis.
(Full disclosure: Lewis and I know each other. We overlapped when he served as CEO of the New York Post and Dow Jones, a sister company of Fox Business. He did not respond to a request for comment.)
He’s a longtime reporter and editor, but the question is whether he has the business acumen to do what needs to be done.
Journalists may be good at reporting on business, but they usually aren’t the ruthless change agents that the job requires.
A true turnaround expert would turn on the burners in The Washington Post’s woke newsroom, inject new blood and create diversity of thought, and return the paper to its glory days.
The paper lost an estimated $70 million to $100 million last year, and circulation has fallen 50% since 2020.
We’ve heard the company’s business trajectory is similarly dire.
Management, we are told, is being hamstrung by staff unions that are unaware of the underlying causes of the newspaper’s decline.
Normally, the company would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but it is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought it in 2013.
With a net worth of about $200 billion, Bezos has plenty of money to burn if he so chooses in the tabloids.
Apparently he doesn’t want that anymore, which is why Lewis recently announced he’s splitting the newsroom into three parts: news, opinion, and a vague social media strategy.
Lewis is also bringing in some new managers from the outside who presumably haven’t been bitten by the awakening bug.
After Lewis announced the new business model last week, editor Sally Busby, who had initially agreed to work under the new system, suddenly resigned.
And the woke people in the newsroom were outraged.
Their biggest complaint wasn’t how their jobs would change or whether there would be layoffs given the string of losses, but that Lewis’ new management structure included hiring three white men to help realize his vision.
Lewis tried to appease the woke mob by vowing to increase diversity at the newspaper and its leadership.
All of this relates directly to the problems plaguing The Washington Post.
The company’s biggest problem isn’t diversity in a conscious sense, but the lack of ideological diversity in its opinion sections and how it approaches news.
It is loyalty to report on what doesn’t sell.
Even the casual reader can see that this is a paper that caters to the left-wing cultural establishment, rather than exposing truth to power in the tradition of Woodward, Bernstein, and others that remain. The paper produces good journalism that gets drowned out by the hackneyed, obviously left-wing propaganda that passes for journalism in its pages.
Write down nonsense
It is no exaggeration to say that the paper’s worthlessness and near-bankruptcy can be traced to the far-left shift in the news front that has worsened since President Trump took office in 2016. At the time, reporters thought it was God’s job to attack the “Orange Man” over scandals that were largely unreal and largely imaginary.
Since then, he has been churning out a ton of left-wing nonsense.
The examples are countless.
Last month, The Washington Post ran a falsely and scandalously overstressed “news” story about how New York Jewish business leaders had the nerve to call Mayor Adams and demand that he break up an anti-Semitic student sit-in celebrating the slaughter of innocent Israelis by Hamas at Columbia University on October 7th.
The message of this ridiculous report is that any group in the world has the right to demand justice from their elected officials, except for Jews who seek to defend Israel, which, as we all know well these days, is the ultimate target of left-wing hatred.
I feel sorry for Lewis.
First, his reorganization announcement was leaked to the New York Times, leaving him scrambling to deal with the fallout late Sunday night and into the early hours of Monday morning.
Since the only option was bankruptcy, he pleaded with staff to work hard to make his reforms work.
“The game is over…we have to move forward to go after untapped audiences…if we keep doing the same things the same way…we’re crazy,” he told NOTEUS magazine.
Now he’s going to have to deal with the most woke reporters on the planet, who bizarrely attacked him for diversity in management, even though he’s likely going to be fired within a year because the business is collapsing.
Moreover, if Lewis doesn’t turn things around, he will eventually have to negotiate with Bezos.
Charles Gasparino is the author of the upcoming book “Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story on the Radicalization of Corporate America.”
