Nobody Asked for This Washington Post Podcast
Bezos’s new opinion section has 515 YouTube subscribers. CBS News is at historic ratings lows. The Daily Wire is shedding audience. The billionaires paying for all of it say it doesn’t matter.
“Are Colleges Undermining Education with Easy A’s?”
“DEBUNKING: The Rich Don’t Pay Their Fair Share”
“The Politics of Conversion Therapy”
Those are real video titles from “Make It Make Sense,” the Washington Post Opinion section’s new flagship podcast, which the paper officially launched on Monday, a day after the media newsletter Status reported that the section had spent $80,000(!) building out a new podcast studio. The show is hosted in rotation by opinion editor Adam O’Neal, deputy opinion editor James Hohmann, and columnists such as Carine Hajjar, Kate Andrews, Dominic Pino, and Jason Willick. Most of them are recent hires, part of the section’s hard pivot right under Bezos.
After more than 20 episodes since they started posting in late February (and 186 videos on YouTube), the show’s dedicated YouTube channel has… 515 subscribers. The launch trailer is on the Washington Post’s main YouTube channel, which has 2.85 million subscribers. It has 1,400 views. (These numbers are as of Wednesday afternoon and will probably have shifted by the time you read this.)
The new opinion section’s video push is failing publicly, and so are the other billionaire-funded prestige-media operations that share its model. The content is dull. The numbers are microscopic. And the men paying for it have been telling us all along that they don’t care. For all the talk of “the marketplace of ideas,” Make It Make Sense looks like yet another right-wing influence operation that exists solely because a billionaire is willing to subsidize it.
What the $80,000 bought
Per Status, the $80,000 was for video gear, not the rest of the studio. The studio itself has wood paneling, a bar, couches, a small framed American flag print on the back wall, and a much larger framed image of a cowboy on horseback behind the hosts’ couch.
Most of the people who used to make video at the Post are gone. The video team is down to three, from about 60 two years ago.
On Apple Podcasts, the show has four ratings averaging 2.3 stars out of five. The most positive review, per 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, reads in full: “This is bad and the people making it should feel bad.” Spotify users have rated it 2.8 out of five. A video posted Tuesday, shot in the new studio, has 217 views. The videos pulling triple-digit numbers, Koebler reports, are probably mostly hate-watches.
The format is roughly what you’d expect if a print editorial board agreed to film one of its meetings without rehearsing first. The hosts sit on the couch under the wood paneling and the cowboy and just sort of riff at each other. Recent topics include why weed is more dangerous than people think, what the media got wrong about COVID, what to do with racist statues, and why the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is bad. Koebler transcribed the first nineteen seconds of one video. One host gets confused mid-sentence about whether any sitting president has ever attended a Supreme Court oral argument. Another host responds, “I think so. I think.” A third concludes, “This is, uhh, we’ll confirm that. We’ll fact check that.” Great work, everyone.
And the thing is… the Post had a really good video team. Dave Jorgenson spent six years building the Washington Post’s TikTok presence into one of the biggest in journalism. He left the Post last year to start his own media company, Local News International, which I covered for Depth Perception in December. His personal YouTube channel now has 358,000 subscribers. His TikTok has 318,000 followers. The Washington Post’s TikTok account, per Koebler, has stopped posting original video. It now reshares wire-service footage instead. A former WaPo video journalist, working with a very small team, has built more than 600 times the YouTube audience of the Post’s flagship new opinion show.
More than the podcast
On May 4, the Post won two Pulitzers. Status reported that to stream the announcement live from K Street, the paper had to bring back two of the video operators it had laid off in February. Nobody left in the building could run the equipment. They walked past the new opinion studio on their way in.
Bezos laid off the people who win the Pulitzers. He’s funding the people who lose the subscribers.
Traffic to the Post’s website was down 24 percent year-over-year in March, per TheRighting. The New York Times was down 0.6 percent over the same period. CNN was up 3 percent. The Post is in its own category.
The Post has shed paying subscribers in waves. About 250,000 canceled after Bezos killed the Harris endorsement in October 2024, per NPR. More than 75,000 followed in February 2025, after Bezos announced the section would run on “personal liberties and free markets.” More canceled in the weeks after February’s mass layoffs.
What’s in the opinion section instead: op-eds about the mayor of New York. The editorial board has published more than ten of them this year alone, per Status. Recent entries: "Mamdani meets economic reality," “Mamdani shows how to sidestep a $5.4 billion deficit,” and “Zohran Mamdani’s ‘creepy and weird’ attack on success.” One current Post staffer told Status: “There’s this bizarre obsession with Mamdani. We’re not even local.”
Regular readers know I’ve written before about how Bezos has gutted the newsroom his opinion section is now embarrassing. I’m not going to repeat that here.
Bezos isn’t alone
The Post’s own newsroom is reporting on this. On May 9, the news side published a long piece by Drew Harwell about the Daily Wire’s collapse. Same trend Bezos’s opinion section is part of. Same owner paying for both the autopsy and the corpse.
Daily Wire’s YouTube subscriber count has gone backward or sideways in 15 of the past 16 months, per Social Blade data cited by Harwell. Web traffic to the site fell to half its prior-year level in March 2026. Ben Shapiro’s own YouTube views are down nearly 70 percent since December 2024. The company has cut 13 percent of its staff since the start of this year. Shapiro himself confirmed to Harwell that revenue fell from 2024 levels.
The Daily Wire reportedly spent $3 million per episode on a seven-episode fantasy series called “The Pendragon Cycle,” per Harwell. Its dedicated YouTube channel has fewer than 1,000 subscribers. In November, the Daily Wire put Shapiro’s face on Times Square billboards to campaign for a Golden Globe podcast award. He wasn’t nominated.
Mitchell Jackson, a journalist-turned-publicist who represents former Daily Wire personalities Candace Owens and Brett Cooper, told Harwell: “They identify as alternative media, but they want to be old media so bad. They don’t hate Hollywood. They’re mad Hollywood hates them.” WaPo Opinion is the same trick run in reverse. A legacy newspaper section is trying to look like alternative media. Both versions fail. The audience isn’t there for either.
The same pattern is playing out at CBS News. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance paid $150 million for Bari Weiss’s Free Press in October 2025 to install her at the helm of the network, per Status.
The Free Press itself is the partial exception. Its traffic grew 7 percent year-over-year in March, the only right-wing news site in TheRighting‘s top 20 to post growth. But Ellison paid roughly 7.5 times its annual revenue for it, and the deal was always about installing Weiss at CBS. Even the success story is funding a failure.
They’ve been telling us this whole time
Here’s what Jeff Bezos allegedly told David Shipley, then the Post’s opinion editor, in February 2025, after Shipley warned him that the section’s rightward turn would alienate subscribers, per the New York Times:
“I don’t care.”
Bari Weiss told CBS News staff something similar in January, only a few months into her tenure running the network’s news division.
“Winning isn’t about ratings. It’s about making things that people can’t live without.”
Both are describing the same business model. Audience metrics aren’t part of how the operators are measuring success. The opinion section says its purpose is to defend “personal liberties and free markets,” per Bezos’s February 2025 memo. That premise depends on a marketplace where ideas compete on their merits. Bezos and Weiss have both said, on the record, that the verdict of the marketplace doesn’t matter to them.
The marketplace has rendered it anyway. The Post is down 24 percent. The Daily Wire is down 50 percent. CBS Evening News just posted its worst-ever April in the 25-54 demographic. The men funding all of it could read the numbers if they wanted to.
What’s on the screen, meanwhile, is what they think doesn’t need to work. Four mid-tier opinion writers on a couch under wood paneling and a framed cowboy. Recent topics: hantavirus, pension padding, the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. The trailer view count and the channel subscriber count that you have to do the math to believe.
Nobody is watching. Bezos doesn’t care.
WaPo Opinion trying to appear like alternative media is the legacy media equivalent of the "How do you do, fellow kids?" meme.
To update a certain movie quote...if they lose a billion dollars a year, they'll have to go out of business in 100 years.