Editors’ Blog
From an anonymous reader on what this person calls the “bored billionaire” syndrome. I think this is very on the mark for what the billionaire savior wants to accomplish when they rescue a struggling publication and why they often get tetchy pretty quickly.
Read MoreI wanted to add to your post about the situation at the Washington Post. If I worked there, the thing I would be most worried right now is that Bezos has entered a very familiar and dangerous phase of his ownership for the newsroom. I call it the “bored billionaire” stage and, in my case, it comes from lived experience.
New billionaires don’t buy money-losing publications as charities whose losses they are willing to underwrite because they believe those publications ought to keep existing. (Old billionaires did: the Fleishmans and then the Newhouses with The New Yorker, the Hedermans and the New York Review, Marty Peretz — via his wife’s Singer inheritance — and The New Republic, etc.)
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the verdict and fallout for convicted felon Donald Trump.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
The Brass’s Take on the Shake Up at WaPo 
We’ve now got the brass’s take on the shake-up at The Washington Post via Dylan Byers at Puck. I subscribe to Puck, and some of the people there are extremely good. Others I read because I want to know what *those* people are thinking. Dylan Byers is in that category for me. He covers media but in a very corporate, rah-rah, mergery, no-actual-interest-in-journalism kind of way. William Cohan covers the titans for Puck too. But I always learn a lot from his reports. Byers is out now with his report on what happened. In his version of events, Buzbee, the departed executive editor, was a bit of a fuddy-duddy, the kind of serious and well-meaning editor you’d expect at the head of a dying institution. Indeed, she was so not a player that, in his account, she participated in the planning for the Post’s new direction, creating a “third newsroom” and such, without realizing until the last minute that it was in part an effort to ease her out. So not a player.
If you’re a subscriber, read his account and if you’re not I think you can read the article by, like, giving them your email. The are two points which suffuse his account and which he in various places states explicitly. The first is that the British newspaper execs have “swagger” and the current Post lacks “swagger” and needs it desperately. Buzbee is a fine editor but lacks “swagger.” She came from the AP, as he notes. How can you have less “swagger”? The second is that the Biden era is boring — “somnolent,” as he puts it — and lacks the “go-go” excitement of the Trump era.
Read MoreWhen I was mulling the WaPo news last night, I noticed a link to an article in the Journal on President Biden’s purported cognitive decline. I glanced at it with a mix of emotions and in a moment I had a flash of clarity about the larger question of newspapers, Britishization and oligarchdom. I realized that in spite of myself I’ve stuck with an unmerited inertia to the idea that the Journal still maintains a high firewall between its news and editorial pages, even though I know, partly from inside accounts, how radically that changed after Murdoch purchased the Journal going on 20 years ago.
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The WaPo Blow-Up And the Ongoing Riddle of Newspaper Decline
A number of you have asked me to share my thoughts on abrupt shake-up at The Washington Post in which Executive Editor Sally Buzbee was abruptly forced out by turnaround CEO Will Lewis. I don’t know enough about the situation at the Post to add more than you’re hearing from other commentary. There are a lot of things that look bad and I’m fairly confident they are bad. But I don’t know the backstory or details well enough to do more than repeat widely shared impressions. But I have a few ancillary observations.
The first is a simple pattern, not terribly surprising, but still worth absorbing. We’ve seen a series of billionaires get into the news business by purchasing for-profit news entities with what seems like the implicit promise that their vast resources will allow them to focus on journalistic excellence even if that means running losses which the new owner can cover without much difficulty. This seemed like the Bezos concept. He bought the Post when it was seriously on the ropes and when its longtime family owners (the Graham family) simply didn’t have the resources to get the paper back to profitability or to secure its place as one of the 3-to-4 national U.S. newspapers.
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Trumpers’ Crocodile Curiosity
Trump supporters are trotting out any number of responses to Trump’s string of felony convictions last week. One of the most perverse and malign is the demand or “request” for jurors to come forward and explain their reasoning. Part of the idea is to suggest that the logic of the verdict is obscure or hard to justify and thus requires explanation. “Can you explain how you came to this very hard to understand verdict?” Neither is the case. The logic of the verdict is very straightforward. There may be some room for debate about how the judge interpreted the relevant law. But within those interpretations the jury verdict is elementary. The other part is to suggest something odd or suspicious in the fact that none of the jurors have yet gone public in the press.
Read MoreI’ve noted a couple times already that we shouldn’t see the Republican reaction to Trump’s conviction as some spontaneous upwelling of anger but a concerted effort to keep stragglers in line and shape press reaction to the conviction. We have at least a bit of backing for that analysis from a CBS/YouGov poll. The overall findings are unsurprising and break down largely along partisan lines. But of those who feel the verdict was wrong, the predominant reaction is disappointment rather than anger. And only barely more than half of those say they’re angry about it.
Read MoreI spent most of the day under the hot sun of Jamaica Bay, close against the runways of Kennedy airport, sight fishing for Bluefish with my younger son. Most of the action was at the beginning of the day. But that was enough to make it worthwhile. The secondary result was that I haven’t caught a lot of news today. What I have caught is a flood of surprise and disgust that Democrats seem at best uncertain about whether to make Trump now being a convicted felon central to their campaign. We don’t know just how the messaging will shake out. Ideally there would be a Democratic chorus that the President himself can stay partly or mostly aloof from. In a moment like this I also cannot forget the example of 2022 in which I along with many others begged and screamed for Democrats to give the Dobbs backlash an operative, concrete focus by organizing a pledge to pass a Roe law with a filibuster exception. In the event, voters took the lead on their own after elected officials did not. (Don’t rule out the possibility that that will happen here.) And I actually see a lot of Democrats hitting him on this again and again. Indeed, the Biden campaign itself put out a statement roundly attacking him on it. But we don’t have the time to wait for things to shake out or see how they develop. The stakes are too high. If it ends up they’re just getting started on lowering the boom there won’t be any harm having also told them to lower it faster.
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A Bit of Trump Trial Campaign Advice
Donald Trump’s superpower is his impunity. He can do or say things that would end another politician’s career, marriage, freedom, and so much more. But he emerges always unscathed. It’s the root of his opponents’ revulsion and the anchor of his devotees’ devotion. That’s because Trump, as we’ve noted many times, is about power. And impunity is one of the great expressions of power. When you see Trump and his toadies turning their rage up to 11 you know they can see, if only intuitively, that the most damaging part of Trump’s conviction is the loss of the aura of impunity it represents, the damage to his brand.
He committed the crime — one we knew about and which Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to and later went to prison for all the way back in 2018. Trump was charged with the crime. He want on trial for the crime. A jury of his peers found him guilty on every count. Done and done. No levitation in defiance of the laws of gravity. No skating on the crime a mere underling did time for. Guilty. Done and done.
Very off brand. Sad!, as the man himself might say.
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