The startling news that The Washington Post has been sold for a wad of cash out of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ pocket — a huge wad, to be sure, $250 million, but 1/20th of what the paper’s selling price might have been 15 years ago when no one thought it would ever be for sale — is a reminder of the biblical adage: How art the mighty fallen.
It certainly was mighty. And it deserved its fall.
The Washington Post was once both a great and hateful newspaper.
The depth and breadth of the paper’s news coverage in the 1970s and 1980s was remarkable. It was well-written, well-reported, thorough, an educated reader’s dream in some ways.
But those qualities went hand in hand with its grotesque self-infatuation and an unimaginably obnoxious sense of its own importance. More than any other institution, it was the Post that typified the tone of the American media that the public came to loathe in the 1980s.
The Post knew what was best: To wit, liberal social views and liberal politics. And it sneered at anyone who might have thought otherwise, from the front page on back.
Was there a crime wave? Pity the criminals; they had it rough. Were communist regimes around the world oppressing hundreds of millions? Tut-tut, you warmonger.
The Post’s utter refusal to be even minimally respectful of conservatives and Republicans was a mark of its blind arrogance.
You might think The Washington Post would have felt itself duty-bound, as the leading paper in the nation’s capital, to write about the GOP in a neutral tone. What’s more, much of the paper’s circulation area was in Republican Virginia, so you might think the Post would want to be careful about insulting its own readers and their views.
Nope. Ben Bradlee, its editor, was an unabashed liberal. He loathed Ronald Reagan, he hated conservatives, and everybody knew it, and almost everybody at the paper was liberated to follow his example.
Why did it have so much power? Well, it certainly played the central role in bringing down the Nixon presidency. But in truth, the Post’s executives made several business decisions in the 1950s and 1960s that made it into a money machine.
Primarily, it expanded into the DC suburbs effectively, thus solidifying an enormous market share, when its competitors failed to do so and dwindled away.
It was filthy rich. And all credit to Katharine Graham, its CEO — she pumped a lot of money back into the paper, and it produced some amazing journalism.
But it’s a cold, hard fact that people were buying the paper then for the reasons people don’t buy it now — the very reasons it made money then and loses money now.
They bought it for the supermarket and department-store ads, the classifieds, the box scores, the movie listings and the funnies. Now they get all of them elsewhere.
The decline of the Post over the past 15 years was nothing short of astonishing. It was once one of the two must-reads in the United States. Now it’s a pretty dull local paper with a halfway decent Web site.
It’s unfortunate that a great journalistic institution has been laid so low.
But it’s good that the Post got knocked on its heels. The Bible also tells us that “pride goeth before a fall,” and, oh, were the Post and its people proud of themselves.
Well, now they’ve fallen. Maybe Jeff Bezos can get them back up.
Maybe.