No, the Washington Post Was Not Too Right-Wing

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, February 05, 2026

 

If you spend enough time in journalism, you’re likely to have lost a job at least once. I have. Indeed, I came back from a brief trip during which I proposed to my wife to find that my employer had sold the magazine I helped edit out from under me. Welcome back! We’ll try to find a place for you. That was generous of my former employer, but, despite their best efforts, there wasn’t a place for me. I moved on.

 

That wasn’t a pleasant experience. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, even if it was, in retrospect, an advantageous career pivot point. Those of us who have lost our jobs due to the Olympian machinations of the managerial set can empathize with the hundreds of reporters who were let go from the Washington Post this week. Whether it springs from human decency or a prudential “there but for the grace of God” sense of personal peril, it is hard not to sympathize with anyone who is about to experience the hardship of temporary unemployment.

 

But within the journalistic ecosystem, there is a pervasive sense that this hardship was deliberately imposed on these reporters. Indeed, their unenviable circumstances are attributable to, if not an outright conspiracy, a variety of bad-faith initiatives. And it all ties neatly into the left’s political worldview. If the Washington Post’s restructuring arose from anything other than its owner’s pitiless outlook toward his own employees, it was because the paper became too right-wing.

 

“There is not a serious market for ‘hard news’ for conservatives,” Slate contributor Alex Kirshner wrote, articulating a version of Matt Yglesias’s self-satisfied and evidentiarily deficient claim that “conservatives don’t like to read.” To compel the Post’s scribes to cater to an ideologically right-of-center audience, too, is to ask them to do “an impossible job.” MSNOW host Chris Hayes agreed with Kirshner. “This is the fundamental truth that I’ve watched generations of media executives try desperately to avoid learning,” he scowled.

 

Many applied this salve to their wounded egos. Post owner and Amazon proprietor Jeff Bezos pushed the paper’s editorial page to the right “to mollify Trump,” which drove “away much of its audience in the process,” the longtime political columnist Ronald Brownstein theorized. That decline, which was inevitable (perhaps even intentional), is then used to “justify further cuts,” which “Trump will also welcome.” It was, in sum, “a human sacrifice to” Bezos’s “courting of Trump.”

 

Even Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got into the mix:

 

Much of the progressive ecosystem long ago primed itself to conclude that the Post’s business failings were the result of its owner’s efforts to pivot the paper’s opinion and editorial side away from niche, identitarian, often “very online” content and toward something with broader appeal. They were primed, in part, by the paper’s own reporters — who, for the record, bore the brunt of this latest round of downsizing. By contrast, the Post’s editorial and opinion side — a millstone around the Post’s neck, according to its critics — has been expanding.

 

Indeed, the paper’s fiscal troubles predated that change to its editorial voice. Even before the Post declined to endorse Kamala Harris (a cardinal sin in the minds of its loudest detractors), it was set to lose $100 million in 2023. Despite the influx of Trump-critical readers who flocked to the paper amid its anti-Trump branding initiatives, it could not monetize them. “The Post has struggled to increase the number of its paying customers since the 2020 election, when its digital subscriptions peaked at three million,” the New York Times reported that same year. “It now has around 2.5 million.” All this was before 250,000 subscribers abandoned the paper in a fit of outrage over its editorial choices.

 

Too many who resent the paper’s evolutionary trajectory have defaulted to a variety of rationales to explain a simple business decision. Its reporters talk about the place like it was a broken home — an erstwhile sanctuary destroyed by the introduction of a loveless steward. In the cascade of criticisms of the paper from its former employees, I didn’t see any provide an objective metric that would justify their employment. Others simply cite Bezos’s wealth as though deploying that non sequitur should prompt us to conclude that one of the wealthiest men in America owes his employees financial security. Perhaps the profit motive itself is to blame for the paper’s struggles. Democrats on Capitol Hill seem to think so.

 

Then there are those who want to believe that the paper’s failure was actually a rare species of success — one prematurely thwarted by their political adversaries. In much the same way that New York magazine’s Ross Barkan blamed San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s loss in a recall election on the Bay Area’s pervasive right-wing biases, the Post must have succumbed to some nefarious exogenous force. Any alternative conclusion might lead the paper’s defenders to look inward, and no one wants that.

 

The simplest explanation is the likeliest: The Post is a distressed asset, and its managers are treating it like one. That is not remarkable. Indeed, making reporting a profitable enterprise in an environment defined by more competition for eyeballs than at any point in the age of mass media has proven elusive. Everyone in this business is navigating that same thorny landscape.

 

It would be easier to conclude that the paper’s struggles are attributable to a betrayal at the top — that its reporters and editors could continue doing what they’d been doing in perpetuity, even at a loss. To maintain that outlook, it’s necessary to conclude that someone is to blame for all this. And, in a way, someone is, but it’s not Jeff Bezos, and it’s not Donald Trump.