Thursday, February 05, 2026
PMT: The diminishment of the Washington Post
The Washington Post announced yesterday that it was chopping 300 jobs from a staff of 800-- cuts that mean no more sports reporting and huge cutbacks in other areas, including cultural reporting and international news. What has been an exodus of subscribers (due to a variety of factors, including editorial shifts pushed by owner Jeff Bezos) will become a flood, inevitably leading to further cuts.
It's heartbreaking for those of us who count on the Post as a secondary paper (which I have for decades), but worse for those who have relied on it their whole lives. When I read about the cuts, I thought immediately of IPLawGuy, a lifelong Northern Virginia resident who explained to me the role of the Post in that area-- that it was a local paper that still had a big sports section, local news, and comics, despite its concurrent role in national politics.
In a way, it is fitting that we learn that the Kennedy Center will be torn down about the same time that the Post revealed its self-immolation. It seems that Washington's cultural touchstones are just being bulldozed all at once.
For political discourse there is a huge cost, as the Post has been home to objective and investigative reporting that few other papers (or other media outlets) could match.
My friend Ron Fournier has often (and correctly) placed the demise of objective journalism at the feet of us, the readers. We have declined to pay for journalism as we have turned to other sources-- either because we don't have to pay for them, or because they confirm our own biases. (Well, not me, actually; I subscribe to three papers and another for my mom, and still get home delivery.)
There is a connection between our failed cultural, political, and journalistic institutions and at some point we are going to have to rebuild all three from rubble or worse.
