The Washington Post Is Dying. Boo. Fucking. Hoo.

The question now becomes: How will Jeff Bezos profit from killing it?

The legacy media has abandoned us in favor of sucking up to oligarchs and fascism. Find voices you trust (other than me) and subscribe where you can. Independent voices like the Opinionated Ogre will be needed in the coming days and we will require your support. This newsletter is free but for $5 a month or just $50 a year, you can help keep the lights on.

It breaks my heart¹ to report that the Washington Post is facing the consequences of sucking up to fascism. It’s a sad sad² day when a pillar of the legacy press is rendered a shadow of its former self due to decisions made by management:

Over the last four years, web traffic has cratered. According to internal data shared with Semafor in recent weeks, the Post’s daily traffic last year reached a nadir of just a quarter of what it was at its peak in January 2021. That month, the Post had around 22.5 million daily active users. But by the middle of 2024, its daily users hovered around 2.5-3 million daily users.

Now, that’s not the most accurate comparison. I’m trying to remember…did something significant happen in January of 2021 that might have had tens of millions of people checking the news on a daily, if not hourly, basis?

It might be the exact same thing the legacy press then spent the next four years helping the right obliterate from the public’s consciousness. What’s a little insurrection and a historic second impeachment between friends, right? Even a presidential election is not going to draw the same kind of traffic as that.

But 2.5-3 million a day still sounds awfully low, even on its own. One wonders if that might have anything to do with the past decade of the press sanewashing Trump? And then spending four years openly undermining Joe Biden in increasingly hysterical and misleading ways?

Not for nothing, when the Washington Post writes more articles about Joe Biden’s age in 3 days than it did about Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions in 6 months, the only conclusion is that they want Donald Trump back in power.³ For a paper with the slogan, “Democracy Dies In Darkness,” that’s impossible to reconcile.

The final straw came when the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, spiked the paper’s endorsement of Harris. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers canceled and they do not appear to be coming back.⁴ And why would they? Why would they return to a paper so obviously working on behalf of an incoming fascist regime?

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

If that didn’t seal the deal, Bezos cuddling up with Trump, bribing him with donating a million dollars, and the paper killing an editorial cartoon from Ann Telnaes for the first time because it accurately showed Bezos doing exactly that? Well, there are ways to tell your audience to fuck off and then there are REALLY over the top ways to do it. This might be the most obnoxious and least subtle I’ve seen since Elon Musk literally told advertisers to go fuck themselves.

So what happens now? Well, there are a few outcomes I can see here:

1. Bezos can sell the paper and wash his hands of the whole thing. It’s clearly become a financial and, more importantly, political liability. As long as the paper does even basic reporting on the coming Trump crime wave, Jeff Bezos is exposed.
   
   There are three paths from here:

   1. Bezos sells the paper to a responsible owner who will push the paper to do real journalism instead of cowering before Trump. This is incredibly unlikely.

   2. Bezos sells the paper to a hedge fund or some kind of conglomerate whose only interest is profit. The paper will try to be all things to all people and eventually be sold off for spare parts until it’s just a shell of its former self, much like Newsweek and CNN. This is very possible but not as likely as…

   3. Bezos sells the Washington Post to one of Trump’s billionaire backers. Miriam Adelson. Elon Musk. Peter Theil. There are over a dozen of them and more. All of whom will turn the Washington Post into a propaganda organ for the Trump regime. This is a recurring theme in autocracies. Russia. Hungary. Turkey. Independent media is swallowed up by the state and its wealthy enablers. Then the line between news and propaganda disappears. Everything becomes Fox News all the time.

2. Bezos can decide to hold on to the Washington Post, because, let’s be honest, it costs him pennies of his actual wealth. Instead of selling it to another billionaire to turn into a propaganda outlet, Bezos does it himself as a show of fealty. Trump loves nothing more than to have people grovel before him in submission. It feeds his insatiable ego.

In this second scenario, it won’t actually matter if those hundreds of thousands of subscribers come back or if hundreds of thousands more leave. WaPo will have an audience of one and the investment will be worth the billions in government contracts Bezos will save by bending the knee as loudly as possible. This is the calculation the tech oligarchs have been making for the last couple of years.

Look at how hard Mark Zuckerberg is slobbering over Trump’s jackboots. He’s one of the richest men in the world and he’s humiliating himself on an almost daily basis trying to replicate Elon Musk’s success in wooing MAGAland. Do not be surprised when he starts shitposting about how stupid libtard Facebook users are later this year.

I’ll get into this some other time but the tech bros tried to sell themselves as progressive champions and when that didn’t work, they took off their masks to reveal the fascist libertarian scumbags underneath.

So do I feel bad for the reporters trapped at a dying paper? Yeah, I guess so. It’s not easy to watch everything you’ve worked for be perverted because of greed. Been there, done that. Still have the scars. But it is what it is and the Washington Post is no longer working on behalf of the public. It hasn’t been for a long time. Watching it die a slow death is not filling me with anything but impatience. Just hurry the fuck up and die already.

There are 294 days until the first Blue Wave and it starts in Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

The Opinionated Ogre is 100% reader-supported. Please help me continue to inform/amuse/outrage you by becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year! If not, it’s all good. Welcome to the Ogre Nation anyway!

1. I’m lying to you. No, it does not.

2. Did I say “sad?” I meant “hilarious.”

3. Literally nothing you say can convince me otherwise because there is no other explanation.

4. I bounced back in the summer when WaPo helped push Biden out of the race. I knew what they were doing and why and it wasn’t because they had the best interests of the nation in mind. Fuck those assholes.