The Washington Post’s Downfall: Blamed on its Overt Political Bias

“We are losing large amounts of money. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

So said Will Lewis, the publisher of The Washington Post, in a widely reported exchange with angry staffers upset about major restructuring at the 147-year-old publication.

He’s 100% accurate. The Post is losing large amounts of money — to the tune of $77 million in 2023 alone.

And, yes, people are largely not reading its stuff anymore.

In fact, since Joe Biden took office in 2021, more than 500,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions — and sugarcoating that dire situation won’t help any of its employees.

More than half-a-million . . . gone.

So why is this happening?

Inflation plays a role, as budget-minded readers cancel their subscriptions and companies reduce their advertising budgets.

Plus, multiple media outlets are suddenly struggling as Google, Facebook and X tweak their algorithms to reduce the amount of news users view in their feeds, while keeping eyeballs and clicks for the tech behemoths themselves.

Result?

A steady flow of traffic has come to a halt, diminishing a critical stream of ad revenue for not only the WaPo, but also for NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Time, Buzzfeed, NPR and many others.

Some conservative publications are seeing a big drop in readership for the same reason.

Breitbart, for example, has tallied a 76% decrease in traffic when comparing February 2024 to February 2020.

At The Blaze, the drop is 67%, while the Daily Caller is down 57%.

Yet the WaPo’s dilemma stands out because — despite touting itself as objective and balanced — it has literally staked out a position in the upcoming presidential election: Get Joe Biden re-elected.

It’s so blatant that, to take just one example, its editorial board is openly advocating for the president to abandon his planned ban on menthol cigarettes to avoid losing black voters — though the same board has pushed for such a ban.

But since such a move by Biden could help put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office, the board has now urged Biden to abandon his principles for the sake of defeating Trump.

“Mr. Trump’s reelection is the kind of nightmare scenario any responsible politician would go to great lengths to prevent,” the board ominously warned on May 8.

“So trim your principles, Democrats, and pander away,” they wrote.

“Just remember: The only thing worse than playing Machiavelli for a good cause is playing Machiavelli for a good cause and losing.”

This advice isn’t surprising.

After all, this is the same publication that, after Trump’s victory in 2016, changed its slogan to the laughable “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

It’s also the publication that has never in its history endorsed a Republican presidential candidate, meaning it gave a thumbs-up to the likes of woeful Dems like Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Al Gore and John Kerry.

The major slant leftward accelerated to ludicrous speed during in the Trump era.

It’s become almost impossible to distinguish the Washington Post from the Democratic National Committee at this point.

Consider how the paper took the Chinese at their word by accusing Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) of peddling a “debunked conspiracy theory” when he argued that COVID-19 may have come from the Wuhan lab in February 2020.

Or its fact-checker actually challenging Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) on whether he really was a descendent of slaves (he was).

Or that time the newspaper accused then-President Trump of being “complicit” when a hurricane was about to hit the United States.

The paper’s coverage of Trump was insane right out of the gate: A Harvard study of his first 100 days found The Washington Post covered Trump negatively 83% of the time.

That is, during his honeymoon period more than eight in 10 stories about the new president were negative.

Now, in 2024, readers have finally taken notice — and are turning away from the paper’s all-too-predictable bias.

Compare the WaPo’s MSNBC-esque rhetoric to The New York Times, which is at least saying the right things publicly — even if its campaign coverage and editorials are as slanted as ever.

“It is not the job of the news media to prevent [Trump winning] from happening,” Executive Editor Joe Kahn explained in a recent interview.

“[So] we become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda?” Kahn asked rhetorically.

The Washington Post has won more than 70 Pulitzers in its history, most famously for its Watergate reporting 50 years ago.

But this ain’t your daddy’s Washington Post anymore.

Democracy Dies in Darkness, it says.

Well, so do profits and jobs and relevance when its newsroom leadership overtly sells out its journalistic integrity in a pathetic attempt to tip the scales for its preferred candidate.

There’s no sugarcoating that.