To answer that question—not likely.
On May 31, 2024, Charlotte Tobitt, writing for UK media site The Post Gazette in the feature Marty Baron: Why WaPo fell behind NYT and why we can’t be Trump ‘combatants’, former editor Marty Baron, explained The Washington Post’s (WaPo) current failure. The measurement of said failure? In the last year, it lost $77 million, and its newsroom is in a DEI revolt.
The 1,347 words penned by Tobitt are nothing more than delusional copium coming from Marty Baron. What happened at the WaPo is what happens when readers lose trust in their institutions, especially the government or the press. The WaPo didn’t realize back in 2020 that Donald Trump was probably the best thing that had happened to the paper in decades, maybe going back to its halcyon days of Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate.
After vilifying the Orange Man from the moment he and Melania descended the golden escalator in 2015, the WaPo and virtually every other mainstream media outlet made it their mission to derail and bring down Trump. At noon on January 20, 2021, Trump was gone, leaving the office just like every one of his predecessors. He was replaced by an empty vessel, a nasty old man, a complete hypocrite who is a divider, not a uniter, who looked on the 75 million people who voted for Trump as enemies, domestic Nazis to be crushed.
But Baron tried to deflect this by making comparisons between the failure of the WaPo and the relative success of its competitor 250 miles north up Interstate 95, the New York Times (NYT), where he once worked. To Baron, it was about the NYT doing a better job of bundling content, not the editorial failure of continual publishing of biased propaganda and hit pieces by the WaPo. Since 2020, the WaPo continued to lose both money and subscribers. For the WaPo, it watched its audience drop a dramatic 50% since 2020 when Trump left office. Things have gotten so bad that the outlet has had to layoff hundreds and even cancel the publication of its companion magazine.
“I mean, we (the WaPo) soared on the basis of coverage of politics, investigations, a lot of other things that helped drive that coverage. But when Trump left office, there was a collapse in interest in political news, Biden wasn’t nearly as interesting, and people started taking the press for granted again.”
You can say that again, Marty.
Baron and the editors at the WaPo lost sight of the fact that 330,000,000 people lived outside of the DC bubble, half of whom—Trump voters, Republicans, and Conservatives—they held in contempt.
How else can you explain that a “convicted felon,” despite everything that the WaPo, the NYT, and the rest of the mainstream media, liberal elites, most Democrats, and the embedded DC Deep State have thrown at him, is likely to be reelected in less than five months? Will the WaPo write about the greatest political comeback since Truman?
Probably not. They will go right back into full opposition mode at 8 AM on Wednesday, November 6. When they do, their fate will likely be sealed. While the 75 million or however many Americans that vote for Trump will be celebrating, the opposition, like at the WaPo, will be howling at the sunrise, just like they did in 2016, instead of being stenographers as they have been for the last three-and-a-half years with Joe Biden.
Democracy doesn’t die in darkness, as the WaPo would like you to think. It dies under the weight of biased, constant propaganda and fake news.