On today’s edition of The Editors, Rich and Co. discuss the recent layoffs at the Washington Post — and the many journalists who have taken to X/Twitter to chastise Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner.
“I am not agnostic,” Charlie says, “on the quality of the Washington Post. I think that it wasn’t very good. I think a lot of the people who lost their jobs weren’t very good, however much they congratulate themselves on Twitter. And I think that the media in general is not very good. I think there is a chasm between how members of the media see themselves and the quality of the journalism that they put out.
“No one seems to stop and say, ‘Well, hang on a minute, why were we losing $100 million a year? Why don’t people like us?'” Charlie reminds listeners that according to polling, people don’t like the media. “I think the media is less popular than syphilis. It’s the least popular institution in the United States. I haven’t read yet a single piece in a mainstream newspaper or written by somebody who was laid off here that accepted that the Post was not doing a good enough job to turn a profit.
“I find the sense of entitlement with other people’s money wildly annoying. I find the pretense that newspapers are imperative public services, like water or highways or the military, intensely annoying. I find the people who whine about it intensely annoying. I don’t have any time for this.”
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