The Raft of the Medusa
The Washington Post proves that, no matter how hard you try, you can't cover some stories neutrally.
In 1819, the young French artist Théodore Géricault unveiled to the public his painting, The Raft of the Medusa. While Géricault intended to send a political message — against the incompetence of the current regime, against slavery, against colonialism — there was practically no way that any painting about the topic could have avoided politics.
The incident on which Géricault based his painting happened just three years earlier. In 1816, the incompetence of the captain of a French frigate, the Medusa, led to its entirely avoidable grounding on a sand bar near Mauretania. On board was a mélange of French colonial life: the new colonial governor of Senegal, his family, and other officials, who were protective of the covert slave trade in France’s colony; a group of abolitionists who wanted to upend the colonial order; common sailors and their officers; Europeans and Africans. Since there was not enough room on the lifeboats for everyone on the ship, the less privileged passengers tried to escape the ship on a makeshift raft, with very little food and water. For the next several days, the victims of this disaster endured starvation, dehydration, madness, suicide, and cannibalism. Out of 150 who boarded the raft, only 15 survived (largely by accident, since the frigate that found them was not looking for them).
Blame immediately fell on the incompetent captain, promoted to his position through a system of patronage that defined the post-Napoleonic government. While Géricault played up the racial elements of the disaster, placing a black man at the most conspicuous part of the painting, critics had already targeted that aspect of the scandal. The Medusa incident was already a raw wound, widening by the separations between defenders of the Bourbonist monarchy and its opponents, between colonialists and anti-colonialists, between defenders of privilege and defenders of people on the lowest rungs.
Even if Géricault had wanted to paint the scene less horrifically, his work would still be making a political statement. By leaning into the racism and horror, he put himself in one political camp. If, instead, he had whitewashed those elements, he would have put himself in the other camp. The choice of depicting this incident ensured that The Raft of the Medusa would be a political statement, no matter how Géricault painted it.
On Monday, The Washington Post found itself in the same position where neutrality was impossible, though at least one writer, and also the editors, certainly must have thought it was possible. On Monday, the Post published an article with the unintentionally hilarious title, “Was the notion of a competitive Republican primary just a mirage?” The author, Dan Balz, provided what seems like an anodyne “analysis” of the Republican race up to the point of Monday’s Iowa caucus, and at that point, the impending New Hampshire primary. Balz’s article was full of unremarkable statements like the following:
Was it all a mirage, this notion of a Republican Party open to abandoning Donald Trump in 2024? For all the vulnerabilities attributed to him at this time last year, and there were some, they quickly melted away. The Republican nomination was never to be a fair fight…
The Republican contest offered the possibility at least of competition. But that was because DeSantis had started on an upswing, thanks to his big reelection victory in 2022 and Trump’s stumbles in those same midterm elections. But almost every twist and turn in this Republican campaign has accrued to Trump’s benefit. Four indictments and 91 felony counts? Wouldn’t that make Republicans question whether Trump should be their nominee? The answer was resounding. The indictments consolidated his support rather than fracturing it. That was the biggest of the game changers…
Trump benefited in 2016 from a fractured field of candidates who declined to quit when it was clear they had no chance. Now the field has winnowed even earlier than might have been expected. On Tuesday, Haley will either prove or not that there is still significant hunger among enough Republican voters to select a nominee other than the former president. Then it could be decision time for her, as it was for DeSantis, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson, Doug Burgum and Vivek Ramaswamy.
One might question the need to write down observations this obvious, on par with noting that ghost peppers are hot, cars can go fast, and, reassuringly, while the sun disappears at night, it always returns in the morning. It is the worst sort of faux analysis, words stated emphatically, meant to sound meaningful, but ultimately empty and unnecessary.
Of course, Balz’s article did not appear ex nihilo. It came after weeks of the Washington Post, and other news outlets, following the Republican “race” as if it were a normal primary process. Let’s hear them debate, awaiting the typical scripted zingers and unscripted gaffes. Let’s follow them on the campaign trail, as they ingest beer and burgers like ordinary folk, and pose next to butter sculptures and corn mazes. Let’s expend air time and brain power on predicting who next will fall off one of the tiny ice floes of public opinion. Let’s festoon the public space with infographics, punditry, and all the other journalistic embellishments that are as much part of the normal democratic process as wreaths, multi-colored lights, and inflatable lawn Santas are to Christmas.
Except, of course, we’re not having a normal democratic process. Someone canceled Christmas, and we all know who it was. Except, this time, the Grinch has 30% of the Whos down in Whoville enthusiastically supporting the cancellation, and others afraid to say anything about it. Sure, some of the other Whos get a brief moment to parade as if this Yuletide were normal, but none of them have the courage to criticize the Grinch. Eventually, they will all fall in line, suffering a great Grinchian humiliation, bending the knee in the hopes that maybe, if the Grinch suffers a stroke, they might seize his ice-cold throne.
Any other story that the media might tell is, frankly, ridiculous. The pretense that you can cover this anti-democratic, fascistic take-over of the Republican Party, as if it hadn’t happened, is as absurdly self-deluded as the Sneetches. There is no way to neutrally cover the Republic “race,” which barely extended into the first primaries, just as there was no way for Géricault to make The Raft of the Medusa politically neutral. The Post’s faux analysis is the equivalent of someone in 1819 trying to depict the Medusa disaster in such agency-free, conflict-avoidant language as, “It’s just God’s will, it’s horrible what happened to those poor wretches, but it’s just the way of the world.”
If you think I’m being too hard on The Washington Post because of one article, consider the hundreds of articles it published since the “children’s table” Republican non-primary started. When is DeSantis going to implode? How annoying will Ramaswamy be in the next debate? Will Haley stop vomiting up her verbal equivalent of warmed-over potato salad? How many verbal broadsides will Christie deliver before his candidacy sinks? All of this is news, in the most minor way possible, at a time when far more important events are happening, but get less attention from the Post.
The electronic front page of The Washington Post presents the same elevation of the trivial. At a time when there are two high-stakes wars raging (and expanding), a significant part of the electorate wants to elect a strongman, that strongman has openly sworn to jackhammer the foundations of American democracy and governance, we are facing not one but multiple constitutional crises, authoritarianism is on the march, the international order is in flux, and we face countless other serious problems, the front page of the Post puts many of these issues behind a wall of triviality. For example, looking at the app today, the front page featured these pressing issues of our perilous times:
- My first Sundance: Stars recall tales of couch surfing, bidding wars
- The McDonald’s Double Big Mac is too much of a good (bad) thing
- How to choose a protein powder that’s better for the planet
- Work Advice: I exposed a friend who cut corners, and now I feel lousy
- Salt in tea? US chemistry professor’s recipe brews controversy in UK
- Carolyn Hax: Force a teen into hobbies besides watching YouTube all day?
- Why reviving a 2,600-year-old spiritual practice made my life better
- Cooking chat: What should I serve to guests while watching football?
To be fair, the front page did contain some more substantive stories about the Middle East, drought in the American West, and the impact of abortion on this year’s election. However, the more meaningful news is merely sprinkled into the stew of less meaningful stories. The stories about the Sundance film festival (very close to the top), the Double Big Mac (not far below), and protein powder (appearing twice in roughly the same area), trumped, in vertical positioning, the latest updates from Israel and Gaza, the first nitrogen gas execution, and a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Other substantive stories appeared not at all in the front-page gallery of what should be worth our attention.
As the famous Marshall McLuhan maxim states, the medium is the message. In the case of the Washington Post’s coverage of the Republican non-primary, and the positioning of news in general, the message is, we live in a comfortable time when we can afford to be concerned primarily about the McDonald’s menu, the superiority of wired headphones over AirPods, or what programming is worth watching during “Whodunit January.” Nothing to see here, normal primaries will continue happening, the Republican Party is not a fascist cult of personality, and there aren’t daily efforts to undermine the norms and institutions that keep this country intact and functional. (A recent example: the governor of Texas wants America to re-consider the concept of nullification.)
Changing the motto of a newspaper to “Democracy Dies In Darkness” is a very small gesture, not something that changes the way that a major outlet presents the news. Shining a light in the darkness is not nearly enough, if you focus on a minor tussle among bear cubs near your flimsy tent, while the mother grizzly is still at large.
I’ve a couple of times here quoted Rick Perlstein in The American Prospect,
Long ago I read both the Times and the Post for national and international news, until around 20-25 years ago when I realized that the Post had a built in flaw they would never overcome: because they are based in Washington they are essentially the home town paper for all things political, and attempt to be “homers” for both “teams”. Did Bush or Gingrich say something that was factually and provably false? Well, you could never find out from the Post, only what Dems said about it, and then you could decide for yourself what was real. I understood the motivation. If they called out a Republican directly, partisans would be angry with the paper and cancel, whereas just reporting what the Dems had said without checking the facts left those same partisans free to blame the lyin’ Dems. They often went to absurd lengths. Was the murder rate increasing? There is no way to know but here’s what party leaders have to say about it. Is inflation better or worse? Again, all we can offer is the perspective of both sides.
This has changed a bit since Trump was elected, enough that I resubscribed after many years. But I never expected this improvement to last.
It’s important to remember that the first job of companies like the Washington Post is to sell papers and generate clicks, which generate dollars. That means generating content and not just one kind of content, but content that’s going to get clicks and eyeballs from either a big or varied audience. It is, after all, a business, despite pretenses to the contrary.
Secondly, I think it’s rather odd to compare the thing that papers do called “analysis” (which is when a “correspondent” essentially writes an opinion piece on an issue of the day in the news section to a national audience) with a piece of visual art created three years after the fact. Neither are, IMO, intended to be neutral, the latter especially so.
On the former, I don’t particularly like how news organizations have blended opinion and news under the guise of “analysis” and other things, but I think it’s clear enough that this piece is Balz’s analysis and not of the WAPO as a whole. I would read too much importance, IOW, into any single piece in any media organization.
So, you may not like what the Balz has to say, and those who suffered through the wreck of the Medusa may not have liked how an artist years later decided to portray their experience, but thems the breaks.
I also think that the “front page” doesn’t matter that much anymore. Personally, I haven’t received physical papers for years, and I rarely visit the home page of any of the major news organizations except as an easy way to get to the search function. I have no idea what is or isn’t on the “front page” of anything.
The stovepipes are long gone.
One article by one guy in one paper doesn’t mean much unless it has something truly novel, groundbreaking, or revelatory, which, let’s face it, is extremely rare. Unlike Medusa, Balz’s piece will be forgotten in a week.
Dan Balz has been writing this way for years, and I rather like it. He aspires to David Broder status as dean of Washington political analysis. None of the moral sanctimony or priggishness of George Will.
Andy, thanks for the response. My point was, certain works, whether art or journalism, can’t be neutral. The Raft of the Medusa is deliberately making a point; the bland coverage and commentary of the Republican “race” thinks its being neutral, but it’s not.
As for the front page, if I did not make it clear, I was referring to the WaPo app, not the physical newspaper.
@Andy:
I assume everyone gets a different “front page” to at least some extent, based on what they have clicked on and read before.
@Andy:
Would it be fair to say that the first job of companies like Scripps Hospital is to prescribe surgical treatments & medications and to bill patients, which generates dollars for doctors, hospital administrators, and stakeholders? They are, after all, businesses as well. Or are there no businesses that have any accountability to society beyond revenue generation?
Considering the importance of an informed population in a democracy, I don’t think it unfair to expect more from national news organizations like the Washington Post than click-bait generation.
@Andy:
This all reminds me of an interview Chris Hayes was doing (I think it was with David Wallace-Wells, writer of The Uninhabitable Earth), where he mentioned that he would like to do more reporting on the environment and global warming, but every time he did, it was depressing and people switched channels, and that wasn’t effective at informing people.
And so, now most environmental stuff was relegated to the B segment, sandwiched between the exciting top story, and the interview, and often held for when that interview is with someone equally exciting. And he wonders if that’s when everyone gets up to make a sandwich.
And now I cannot stop seeing something similar elsewhere. Here’s a cookie to get you in the room, and if you sit through this you’ll get another cookie.
@Scott F.:
Fair is a stretch, however here in the real world it would be accurate.
@Kingdaddy:
@Andy:
As usual, Andy makes points worthy of serious consideration, though I see it quite differently from him.
The point with which I mostly agree, blending of reporting and analysis, is an issue. But I can only mostly agree with it, because no bright line exists between the two.
I’ve seen people, mostly found on the RW, argue that journalists should just report who said or did what and when. But that isn’t informative. Worse, it results in media vulnerable to be nothing more than a megaphone. (I suspect that many of those who lob that criticism also complain that the ‘MSM’ are just stenographers for ‘the Left’.)
The point here: informative reporting requires context. More context provided; the higher the risk of perceived bias. That word, “bias”, is one of those things that has become meaningless from both frequent (mis)use and that no one complaining about it has the slightest clue what to do about it.
To me, that’s the most important part of all this. Just as telling any story requires choices about what to include, the practice most often called objective, statistical data, also requires choices at every step of the process. To me, that is what is so dangerous–expecting an ideal that doesn’t exist.
Finally, a shorter response to Andy’s argument that media outlets are first and foremost businesses.
We ought not expect physicians, attorneys, law enforcement, or other professions that require public trust to make decisions based on financial considerations. Media outlets should be treated no differently.
The moment that business interest is placed above the actual goal of a profession is the moment that the service provided is compromised. The result is entities that are the social version of the virus in biology– organisms stripped of all life functions but the bare machinery of replication.
@Kurtz:
The longtime masthead of the NYT – at least the paper version – was All The News That’s Fit To Print. The very decision about what is fit to print is ultimately editorial.
@Scott F.:
@HarvardLaw92:
It’s one thing when making money and/or increasing share value is used as an explanation. It’s a very different thing when it’s brought up as absolution.
On topic: I remember reading that the 1851 painting of Washington crossing the Delaware was likewise politically inspired. IRL, he was probably seated. The other people in the boat represent a multi culti section of America with two of them being rather dark. The nature of the media influences the depiction. The early twentieth century media sold itself as showing reality without a filter, but we know that FDR was in a wheelchair and that Trump uses a strange toner of spray paint on his face.
@Kurtz:
Woke mind virus?
@Andy:
To pile on a bit, I think that that is incomplete and is a function of a very specific business-school ethic that came of age in the 80s (or so it seems).
The Post exists to report the news and needs to make money to do so. The more it is reduced to money-making alone, the more it drifts from its core purpose (such as the hospital reference above).
I think one of the core problems with American culture is the notion that just because a business needs money to operate that, therefore, the true reason for the business to exist is to make a profit.
Profit uber alles is reductive and misses the point, really, of why people do what they do.
The main, and necessary, job of WAPO, NYT, NBC, CNN, et al is certainly to peddle “papers”. But they also expect respect and credibility, and demand special privileges, based on answering to a higher calling, to inform the citizenry. In return, we should hold them to that calling. As I’ve said of the Supreme Court, you want respect, behave respectably.
@Kingdaddy:
I think the problem is that no one agrees on what “neutral” is. I find the whole debate to be entirely pointless. My preference is for straight news reporting to focus on the 5 W’s and then to let “analysts” and opinion people argue from there. I seem to be in the minority on that. Most seem to want “news” to be contextualized toward certain truths and get upset when that doesn’t happen.
@Scott F.:
And we would all like nice things.
There are two halves of the equation here. On one hand, there are journalists who provide information that is intended to inform that population. Those journalists need to be paid for that work. On the other hand, it is the population that creates the market by consuming what journalists create and signaling to journalists what they want to consume.
It’s not a novel argument to point out that the economic model that ties these two ends together hasn’t worked perfectly for the last couple of decades. National News organizations need to pay the bills regardless of what expectations one thinks they ought to have.
Now, I think several people, including you, are taking an unfair interpretation and inferring that I’m suggesting that business considerations are the ONLY consideration for the news business, offering up doctors and other professions as examples. Of course, this isn’t what I’m saying at all, but you can’t ignore the business aspect – there’s a reason that the collapse of the old business model for journalism brought about by the Internet has been such a huge deal.
@Steven L. Taylor:
You can pile on all you want, but the fact of the matter is that the WAPO reportedly lost $100 million last year. They cut a bunch of staff.
The audience and dropped significantly since Trump left office:
A lot of media companies did very well during the Trump years. The MSNBC opinion shows, IIRC, had higher viewership than Fox.
But I’m sure during this election year with Trump back in the news cycle, that historic experience of the Trump news boom on the bottom line will not affect editorial decisions….
Sorry, but as nice as it would be to imagine that the profession of journalism is a priesthood of truth divorced from the reality of the business of journalism, it just ain’t so.
@Steven L. Taylor:
An insight I had never formulated. See? That’s why I hang out here.
There’s a moment in Moonstruck – a fucking flawless screenplay, BTW – where John Mahoney is talking to Olympia Dukakis, and she asks him why men cheat on their wives. She supplies her own answer, “I think it’s because they fear death.”
I do like a crystallizing moment. Exactly right. They conflate purpose and means to achieve that purpose. Money is a tool, not a purpose in itself.
I have never understood the Musks of the world who seem to always need more. Need is weakness, doesn’t matter if it’s for money or fentanyl. If you’ve got everything you need and pretty much all you want, WTF? Buy Twitter and make an ass of yourself? Or maybe realize you took a wrong turn somewhere, and you need to take a look at your life.
Life is suffering, attachment to desire causes suffering. A bit grim, but the Buddha knew some things.
@Andy:
I agree. But consider the consumers, the audience. Are either of us typical of the average consumer? Most people get their news in fractured bits, without context, without a base of knowledge to make sense of a story. Yes, I am saying people are idiots. Watch this Kimmel man on the street bit. The question was, literally, can you name any country on this unmarked map? Any country. Any.
I watch things like that and think, why don’t I just drink myself unconscious til I die?
The Pogues used the image for the cover of their second studio album. I don’t know what value that brings, but it’s what I’ve got.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Sodomy_%26_the_Lash
@Kathy:
It’s just an unavoidable fact, to be frank about it. Whatever the mission, however noble it might be, if it doesn’t generate cash flow sufficient to at least support itself, the mission becomes superfluous because the entity will no longer be able to continue executing it. It isn’t an absolution – it is part of, and an unavoidable part of, the core purpose.
You can make money without reporting the news, but you can’t continue to report the news without making money. At least not indefinitely…
@Andy:
@HarvardLaw92:
What are you saying here? I am somehow chasing unicorns?
I have some expectation that a news organization would forego (or at least curtail) faux “neutrality” and withering triviality in their choices in publication – choices allegedly bound by necessity to not offend or discomfort a potential revenue stream – when there are important reasons for this given this moment in our national history. If that is wishing for nice things, then “hell yes!” I want nice things.
The central premise in the OP is that Balz specifically and the Washington Post more generally is covering the 4x indicted felon, the civilly liable sex predator & fraud, the self-professed dictator wannabe who has just steamrolled to the place of presumptive nominee of Republican Party as if this is just another quadrennial January in New Hampshire. (With Super Bowl parties coming, no less.) This is a problem for a democracy dependent on the Fourth Estate to be well informed. This is an unprecedented moment in our national history, so business models be damned. The Post can return their focus to cash flow once Trump has been removed as a threat.
@Andy:
Except that is nowhere near what I said. I am not denying that they need to make money to operate. We all do. I am noting that it is way too simplistic to reduce any operation down to a simple profit statement.
In reality, most of us don’t operate that way. It is certainly rarely the main reason a business is started, nor the main reason people what they do regardless of what a simplistic version of market capitalism tries to teach us.
And to be clear: I am not saying take the profit motive out of the equation. I am saying it, alone, simply isn’t the entirety of the equation, but a lot of times American culture wants to tell us it is.
And I think your initial response to Kingdaddy was simply too much leaning into that simplistic formula.
@Scott F.:
BTW, I don’t even think the coverage in question is about cashflow (the other silly links about Big Macs probably fit better in that category).
I think that main problem that the OP Is trying to identify is, as you yourself emphasize, the unprecedented nature of Trump himself and yet Balz (and others–I would note NPR’s coverage of the primaries this week) as just normal stuff.
I think the profit thing is a side-distraction from the main point.
@Kathy:
Exactly.
Further, it is an insufficient absolution.
One last note: why is everyone assuming that WaPo’s current behavior is, in fact, profit-maximizing?
To my point about American culture, we are all pretty much taught to just accept business activity, because they are doing what they are doing to make money. But, if we pause for a second, we know that just because a business does X, that X ism in fact, the profit-maximizing action.
There are too separate issue here (at least). One, as per the original post, is a question of the quality of the coverage.
The second is the profitability thereof.
They may intersect and reinforce, and they may not, but they are measured differently.
@Steven L. Taylor:
And I am in no way reducing the operation down to a simple profit statement. I’m simply pointing out the well-known fact that business decisions and editorial decisions are not as separate as some would like to claim or believe. Again, largely due to changes in the business model of journalism. This isn’t some defect in the profession, but an unfortunate consequence of how technology and society have developed to make the business part very difficult.
“Leaning too much” is a subjective matter of degree. No one can deny that business decisions influence news coverage and editorial decisions. We can debate where the line is drawn, but not that a line exists.
But it was more about this, which I neglected to quote in my original comment:
That is something I’ve been complaining about for years.
The question is why?
I have previously pointed out a poster-child case – the so-called controversy of the Covington school kid in the maga hat on the National Mall in a viral video. That non-event spawned about a dozen articles each in the NYT, WAPO and many other outlets. Why so much journalist effort for something so trivial?
You often complain about “horse race reporting” and how useless it is. Why does horserace reporting continue?
The answer to all these is consumer demand.
There isn’t a lot of reporting on two high-stakes wars because most Americans aren’t interested. There is 100 times more reporting about Gaza than any other conflict not because that war is more important, but because it’s of more interest to American consumers of news.
The reason there were dozens of stories on a stupid, trivial interaction on the mall involving a kid in a maga hat is not that it was important but because it hit all the culture-war buttons and generated great interest and, therefore, demand for reporting on the topic.
The reason that horse-race reporting continues is because most people are not political scientists, and they like horse-race reporting.
The reason local TV news is all about crime, sports, and weather with a sprinkle of human interest stories is because that is the formula that gets the most eyeballs.
The biggest explanation, therefore, for Kingdaddy’s complaints – which mirror my own, longstanding complaints – is that the problem is the audience and the realities of realities of the current business model for journalism. The old days are gone when journalism was subsidized by other things and could be more purely professional.
Note that I’m not saying this is the only explanation, or that it’s the the total explanation, but I think it’s impossible to deny that journalism is a currently demand-driven business.
You’re missing the point. It’s definitionally not “profit maximalizing” when you’re losing money and laying people off.
You just had a post here on OTB about the problems at the LA Times. It is not about profit, it is about survival. If the survival of WAPO relies on increasing readership and subscriptions, then it is simply foolish to believe that they will ignore whatever will increase readership and subscriptions, whatever that might be.
@Steven L. Taylor: Do you seriously think that making money is not the primary goal of nearly every business and nearly every employee in that business?
That people would simply do the work for free if their needs were met otherwise?
I know very, very few people for whom that is true, and they all work in science and academia.
You underestimate the number of people working at crappy office jobs, or at Waffle House behind the grill, dreaming of a day when they don’t have to suck up to the boss, if they survive to Social Security age.
American culture is 100% about the money, and the conspicuous consumption that follows from that money.
We don’t do ANYTHING in our country unless there is money involved. We don’t solve problems unless there is a way to make money from the solution.
Health care, for example, is primarily about billables. Hospital systems create their budgets based on diagnoses and drive targeted admissions to match those preferred diagnoses, discouraging admissions that are less profitable.
It goes on and on in this country.
@Tony W:
Actually, I do not think it is the “primary” goal. I think it is an essential goal for obvious reasons, but I think that reducing it all to “making money” rather misses the actual complex motivations of what people do and why businesses are created.
Do you really think, to stick to the example above, that the primary reasons that WaPo was founded was to make money?
Did Jeff Bezos buy it because that was the best ROI he could get for his money? (Spoiler: it wasn’t).
That is a wild leap from what I said above. No, I don’t think that, but I do think that while we would all like to be paid more than we make, at the end of the day money is not the sole reason people choose to do what they do.
If money was the sine qua non of explaining behavior, why would anyone become, for example, a social worker?
People often could make more money if they would move away from their families, and yet they choose not to do so.
Money is one variable. It is not the sole one, nor even probably the most significant one.
Etc.
@Tony W:
Again, saying that money is involved, which is indisputable, is a far cry from reducing everything to money.
I will note that much depends on what your definition of “primary” is.
@Andy: The problem with your position, as I see it, is that you immediately leap to: they do it to make money. (“It” in this case what is described by the OP/horse race coverage, etc.).
While, yes, they want/need to make money, you are automatically assuming facts not in evidence: that the behavior that the OP is criticizing is profit maximizing.
You simply don’t know that that is true.
Indeed, if what the people want is what WaPo is giving them, why is the LAT in trouble, as I am pretty sure they have been engaging in similar horse race coverage as well as the same frivolous stuff Kingdaddy noted in the OP.
The problem is not the assertion, per se, that the paper needs to make money. The problem with the assertion is using it as a blanket excuse for what they do, which may not only have quality problems but may, in fact, not be the most profitable route.
Also, I would again note the OP is about the question of neutrality in coverage, as well as a general critique of WaPo’s treatment of the abnormal as normal as to why that is egregiously problematic in our current political moment.
@Michael Reynolds:
Interestingly, that’s a concern that Bulwark movie reviewer Sonny Bunch made about the newly-released film, Zone of Interest. What do audiences make of a movie about the Holocaust in which the Holocaust is happening in the very distant background? How many of them will have the context to understand what the film is trying to do?
@Tony W: There are other motives for what people do than income, profit, or market share. Those are definitely important, on Maslow’s hierarchy, or anything else. But people do things for other reasons, too, sometimes in alignment with economic incentives, sometimes at odds with them. Whether the reasons are religion, tribalism, or something else, there’s obviously more in the mix of reasons why people do the things they do. At a personal level that’s true, whether they’re Trump voters who are voting against their economic interest, someone who decides to become a priest, nun, or pastor, or countless other examples.
It’s true, too, at an organizational level: profit maximization is certainly a primary concern for businesses, but there are lots of human groupings (political parties, churches, charities, professional organizations, etc. etc.) that are not businesses. Even for-profit firms, like The Washington Post, have a primary mission that is sustained by profit, but it’s not their raison d’ê·tre. Stray too far from the primary mission, in pursuit of profit, and bad things are likely to happen (lose readers, lose employees, face public and professional opprobrium for violation of standards and ethics, etc.).
A conspicuous example are the online journals that spew so many ads that they are unreadable. They’ve failed their primary mission, providing useful and interesting content, in the pursuit of dollars.
@Steven L. Taylor:
In other words, reducing everything to the bottom line is both an inadequate explanation and a shoddy excuse.
@Kingdaddy: Yup.
@Andy:
Without taking a position on the rest of the argument, this part is incorrect. It is quite possible to maximize profits and still lose money. It’s called “not having a viable business”.
@Steven L. Taylor: I think Bezos bought it, not for the money it can make him directly, but for the money it can make him indirectly by influencing the public with his new bullhorn.
I remain steadfast that in American culture nothing matters except money.