Back in December 2016, the Washington Post breathlessly reported that Russian hackers had infiltrated the U.S. electric grid through a Vermont utility company, supposedly putting millions of Americans at risk of freezing in the dark. Naturally, the paper hinted this was part of Vladimir Putin’s grand plan to sabotage the 2016 election. Very dramatic. Very wrong.
It later turned out the laptop involved wasn’t even connected to the grid. Minor detail, apparently. The Post never issued a real retraction—just one of its soft “editor’s notes” and then proudly covered the investigation its own bad reporting triggered. Journalism at its finest.
Two years later, the same outlet won Pulitzers for pushing the now-debunked narrative that President Trump colluded with Russia to “overturn democracy.” Fiction rewarded as fact. Hollywood could learn something.
Now fast-forward to this week: the Washington Post laid off about 300 employees—roughly a third of its staff. If you listened to the media elite, you’d think the Constitution had been shredded live on cable news.
No one enjoys seeing people lose their jobs. Layoffs are painful, and usually the good workers go first while the worst ones hang on. But the reaction from many journalists—who seem to believe employment in media is a constitutional right—says a lot about why trust in journalism has collapsed.
Over the past decade, the Washington Post has been a major player in that collapse. This is the same outlet that gave credibility to the Brett Kavanaugh gang-rape accusations, tried to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story, spread the Gaza “genocide” narrative, covered up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, smeared the Covington kids, and ran countless hit pieces dressed up as reporting. You could fill a library with WaPo stories that read more like political fan fiction than journalism.
The paper also mastered the trick of outsourcing opinion to so-called “experts.” Remember headlines like: “Vote to oust Kevin McCarthy is a warning sign for democracy, scholars say.” Translation: “We found people who already agree with us.”
This week, the Post cut 13 climate-change reporters and even a reporter whose only job was covering “race disparity.” That tells you everything about the activist mission it’s been running instead of a newsroom.
And let’s not forget: modern “fact-checking,” where left-wing columnists cosplay as neutral referees while pushing partisan arguments, was practically invented there.
The Post used to be one of the few outlets that could afford serious global reporting. Instead, it turned into something closer to a foreign propaganda relay. At least six members of its foreign desk previously worked for Qatar’s state-run Al Jazeera, including its Middle East editor. Shockingly, coverage of that region became riddled with disinformation—requiring late corrections after the narrative had already spread.
There are many reasons the Washington Post is losing readers. One of them is simple: credibility isn’t renewable energy. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
Even Jeff Bezos seems to have noticed. Last year he announced the editorial page would shift away from progressive activism and start championing capitalism. Apparently, that offended readers living comfortably in one of the richest metro areas on Earth.
So no, democracy didn’t die this week. What died was the illusion that propaganda can be passed off forever as journalism. And if there’s any silver lining here, it’s that maybe—just maybe—the American press will start remembering its real job: telling the truth instead of selling a narrative.
