CNN says The Washington Post just laid off 100 people.
In reality, it’s worse than that. The Post has signed 240 people to voluntary separation agreements. It has gotten rid of a whopping 10% of its entire staff. And those on the left fear that freedom of the press and free speech are at stake. Here’s why.
The Post has been ailing financially for sixteen years—since 2009. The family that owned it and made it great, the Graham’s, were having a hard time carrying its losses.
Then, in 2013, a savior with deep pockets swept in: Jeff Bezos. Bezos bought the Post for $250 million. And he made the paper profitable again. Briefly.
Ten years later came the 2024 election. But by then, the Post was once more experiencing losses.
During the election, the editorial board of the Post decided to endorse Kamala Harris. Jeff Bezos said no. The backlash was stunning. 250,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions. That increased the Post’s losses considerably.
But there’s something much deeper than losses at stake here. There are two mainstream medias in the United States. On the one side are Fox News, Newsmax, One American News, The New York Post, the Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, the Wall Street Journal, and a fistful of others. Not to mention talk radio and social media influencers. The combined monthly viewership and readership of media on the right is roughly 50 million.
On the left are the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN. Not to mention NPR and social media. The left media’s monthly audience is roughly 80 million.
But those on the left fear that in the next four years, the media they love will be turned into propaganda organs for the upcoming president. In fact, a few on the left believe that Mr. Trump’s tactics hark back to Adolf Hitler.
Mr. Trump’s first wife, Ivana, told a friend of mine, a famous actor, “You think Donald doesn’t read. That’s false. He keeps two books on his bedside table. One is Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the other is My New Order, Hitler’s collected speeches. And he reads from one of them every night before he goes to sleep.”
In the 1930s, Hitler weaponized the word Lügenpresse, the lying press. He used that label as a sledge hammer to get rid of all the mainstream news outlets that opposed him and to turn the German media that was left into a propaganda machine pumping out his point of view.
Those on the left are afraid that Donald Trump is about to do the same thing to the United States. In 2017, Mr. Trump called the media on the left fake news, his version of the word Lügenpresse. What’s more, he called the press on the left the enemy of the people.
Then, in 2024, Mr. Trump took ABC to court for defamation. His complaint was that George Stephanopoulos, a star ABC anchor, said that Mr. Trump had been convicted of rape. But, in fact, said Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Mr. Trump had only been convicted of sexual abuse.
Trump won his case. He roused fear in the hearts of the news outlets’ corporate owners. So ABC’s corporate owner, the Walt Disney Company, bent the knee and paid Mr. Trump fifteen million dollars.
That sent a shiver down the spine of those on the left.
Then, last month, media moguls like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg made pilgrimages to Mar a Lago to bow and scrape to Mr. Trump. What’s more, they made donations of a million dollars each to Mr. Trump’s upcoming inauguration.
Those on the left are certain that this is just the beginning of Mr. Trump’s effort to turn ABC, NBC, CBS, and papers like the Washington Post into obedient outlets for Mr. Trump’s version of the truth. After all, since 2017 Mr. Trump has pointed to a simple fact. The government issues the broadcast licenses of the major networks. Someone in control of the government could yank those licenses. Putting the top three television news networks out of business.
No wonder some on the left are concerned that Mr. Trump may try to pull a Hitler.
References:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/media/washington-post-layoffs
https://www.washingtonian.com/2023/11/28/washington-post-says-involuntary-layoffs-could-be-next/
https://www.washingtonian.com/2023/12/19/washington-post-more-buyouts-than-expected/
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2013/08/07/the-washington-post-by-the-numbers/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/washington-post-jeff-bezos-william-lewis/678799/
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/washington-post-profitable-growing-two-years-jeff-bezos-ownership/
https://www.historyhit.com/fake-news-donald-trump/
https://www.ft.com/content/e4c53b2c-a06e-4b62-81b2-e422c2efcb66
https://www.ft.com/content/130ad58d-4b26-4a5d-86da-17a17de19709
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/mark-zuckerberg-wardrobe-facebook-maga-trump
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/11/trump-nbc-broadcast-license-243667
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/donald-trump-marie-brenner-ivana-divorce
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Concludes Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” Bloom’s next book, coming out February, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Harvard’s Ellen Langer calls The Case of the Sexual Cosmos “fascinating.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.net