3 Smart Takes on the Shake-up at the Washington Post and What the Mini British Media Takeover Might Mean
The Washington Post and Daily Beast are about to experience a major culture change.
Hi all, Parker here.
On Monday, Washington Post publisher Will Lewis shook things up by pushing out executive editor Sally Buzbee and replacing her with a British duo to lead a new, divided newsroom structure.
Matt Murray, former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, will lead the Post through this year’s elections before focusing on new editorial ventures to generate revenue, including micropayments and social media. Afterward, Rob Winnett, currently the deputy editor at the Telegraph, will take over the Post’s main newsroom.
With these moves, Lewis — who came on as CEO and publisher of the Post in January after a career that included time as the publisher of the Journal and editor of the Telegraph — will reshape the paper in his own image.
This will undoubtedly lead to a major cultural shift at the Post. Ideologically, this could mean a move to the right. Here are a few smart takes I saw about Lewis’ announcement:
“If the Washington Post is to fly again, its journalists must share the cockpit” (The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan, 6/4/24)
Enter Will Lewis, a hard-driving British journalist who had been publisher of the Wall Street Journal. In January, Bezos named him the Post’s publisher and CEO.
So far, it’s been a rocky reign, with this past week especially chaotic.
Lewis made several heavy-handed moves that have alienated and angered an extraordinarily talented journalistic staff. He abruptly forced out Sally Buzbee, who had succeeded Baron to become the paper’s first female editor, and immediately replaced her with two of his former colleagues, even as he revealed his plans for a radically restructured newsroom. (The former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Matt Murray and former Telegraph deputy editor Rob Winnett will lead two adjacent Post newsrooms, including a new one dedicated to “service and social media journalism”; and then they’ll switch roles after November’s election. Yes, it’s all very weird.)
“‘What the Hell Is Going On?’: Inside The Washington Post After a Surprise Newsroom Shake-Up” (NOTUS, Matt Fuller and Tara Golshan, 6/3/24)
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Carol D. Leonnig also asked about the “series of stutter steps” the Post has had in the last 18 months — with buyouts, a new publisher and now a new executive editor — and Lewis became visibly frustrated the longer her question went on.
“You know how Trump makes scoffing faces and eyebrows? That was Lewis multiple times throughout the meeting,” one source said, pointing to Lewis’ exasperation, particularly during Leonnig’s question.
Eventually, Leonnig expressed concern that the publication’s new leadership team, meaning Lewis and Winnett, was from different publications with different values and priorities.
“You’ve chosen people — almost, it seems, intentionally — with a very different culture from the Washington Post,” Leonnig said, according to a source, seemingly referring to the tabloid culture on Fleet Street that is fundamentally different from the Post.
Lewis perceived that as “the British question,” and said he was “blind when it comes to nationality,” visibly annoyed by the line of questioning, per multiple sources.
“Beware the Tory takeover of the Washington Post” (Press Watch, Dan Froomkin, 6/4/24)
According to Lewis’s memo, the audience he wants the new newsroom to serve is “the millions of Americans who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed.”
He was even blunter at the Monday meeting: “It’s the most important thing: untapped audiences,” he said.
But which untapped audiences? The largest audience of people “who feel traditional news is not for them” skews to the right. They are consumers of Fox News and TikTok. They hate what the Washington Post stands for. Does Lewis want to chase after that crowd? I fear that he does, and that it would require hideous contortions.
That’s not all. The Daily Beast made similar changes this week.
On Tuesday, new Daily Beast publisher and CEO Ben Sherwood announced the removal of editor-in-chief Tracy Connor. Replacing her is Hugh Dougherty, who will have the title of Executive Editor. Dougherty’s resume includes stints at conservative US and UK outlets, including The New York Post, The Daily Mail, The Evening Standard, and The Sunday Telegraph.
According to a note sent to Daily Beast staff, obtained by Semafor’s Max Tani, Sherwood wants to turn the Beast into “an intelligent tabloid.”
What does this mean for those two outlets? Here’s one grim theory.
As you may (or may not) know, the level of anti-trans obsession that flows through the mainstream British press is truly wild. For instance, Assigned Media’s Evan Urquhart notes that as of Wednesday, the Telegraph had already published 10 separate anti-trans articles already this week alone. Yes, the same Telegraph whose deputy editor will soon run the Post.
Is that what we can come to expect from the Post and the Beast? I sure hope not, but Urquhart makes a compelling case for why that’s not out of the realm of possibilities — and why most people might not notice or care.
“Uh Oh! Conservative Brits Take EIC Roles at Two Major US News Orgs” (Assigned Media, Evan Urquhart, 6/5/24)
These sorts of extremely misleading stories have largely been confined to the right-wing press in the United States, except in the case of the New York Times, the one mainstream US newspaper that has repeatedly found creative ways to distort news stories and mislead readers in news reporting relating to gender-affirming care. However, with the installation of Winnett and Dougherty, two outlets whose reporting has remained consistent and objective (though not universally friendly) on trans issues are being helmed by editors connected to two of the worst purveyors of transphobic moral panic in the UK and the US. There’s no sugarcoating it, this does not look good for trans people, or for anyone who believes that journalism should first and foremost be about informing the audience and presenting the truth.
Analogizing to the situation at the New York Times, it has long been surmised that the anti-trans bent the paper took starting roughly in 2022 has been driven by the desire of publisher A. G. Sulzburger, who pressed the NYT to court more readers with right-wing views. Targeting the trans community for these efforts has a certain logic to it because the trans community is quite small and most members of the public are neutral and don’t rank trans issues very high. Pivoting towards a right-wing bias on trans issues is therefore relatively safe to do, at least compared to skewing coverage on issues where more Americans understand the basic outlines of the debate and will be aware of the paper taking a sudden hard right turn.
This logic, which takes advantage of the marginalization of the trans community to turn it into a scapegoat for a paper hoping to cultivate readership among the culture-war obsessed GOP, would seem to be equally sound for a conservative-courting Washington Post publisher, or for the CEO of the left-leaning Daily Beast. While at least one media watcher has predicted that fears of a strong right shift at the Washington Post are overblown, a more subtle shift that leans on attacking the trans community to signal a change in direction to right-wing readers, is compatible with an outlet seeking to court conservative readers by diluting the quality of the news by tainting it with an ideological skew, but only in areas where the most of public won’t notice or complain too much.
Bad news, trans folks. We’re directly in the center of that bullseye, and it looks like another couple triggers may have just pulled.
I’m telling you right now, when the Daily Beast or Washington Post, which already isn’t great about trans issues, starts going all in on anti-trans stories and op-eds 1, 2, or 5 years from now, I don’t want a single person to be like, “No, it’s not a moral panic!” It is and it will be.
A WaPo Poll Found That Significant Majorities Support Pro-Trans Policies, But Reported The Exact Opposite
Or maybe everything will be totally fine. Who’s to say, really?
But to bring this one back home, after seeing her initial thoughts on X (“British men turning up to run everything is - and I cannot state this too strongly — a bad idea”), I asked Columbia Journalism School professor and actual British person Emily Bell what else she had to say about this mini media takeover by the people of her homeland:
There’s always been fairly high traffic among journalists and editors from London to New York. The fact there is so much at the moment is part coincidence, maybe. But I think owners see British national press as scrappier and more competitive historically. It certainly is that. But it’s also much more politically affiliated and at the edges sometimes less ethically bounded than US journalism
Oh fun!
The same week Kathleen Parker writes “You peons don’t know Martha Anne Alito like I do so shut up,” the Post decides to get editors from someplace with fewer ethics. Because why pitch your paper to the people who read it when you can pitch it to people who don’t?
“If we keep making our paper worse, eventually more people will buy it” has been the strategy of US news outlets for two decades. It’d be grimly funny if the Post’s reaction to the inevitable failure of this policy wouldn’t be to make it even worse.
Tory BS infecting the US