My Breakup with The Washington Post

Why I unsubscribed from the paper I relied on for so many years

Anyone who lived through Watergate, or who’s seen “The Post” or “All the President’s Men” knows The Washington Post has an incredible history of investigative reporting. From Deep Throat to the Pentagon Papers, the Post was on the frontlines of fearlessly speaking truth to power.

In 2016, the paper adopted its first slogan in 140 years: Democracy Dies in Darkness. Many attributed it to the Washington Post Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, but he says got it from a judge’s ruling in a First Amendment case. But just 8 years later, that slogan would become a little too on the nose.

I followed the Post and relied on their news during the Mueller investigation into Trump Campaign ties to Russia. Then in May, 2018, The Washington Post reported that then-president Trump had pushed the postmaster general to double the shipping costs for Amazon because he didn’t like the coverage he was getting at the paper. From the Post:

Few U.S. companies have drawn Trump’s ire as much as Amazon, which has rapidly grown to be the second-largest U.S. company in terms of market capitalization. For more than three years, Trump has fumed publicly and privately about the giant commerce and services company and its founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, who is also the owner of The Washington Post.

Then five months later, the paper published the story of the murder of one of its own reporters at the hands of Trump allies:

Turkey has concluded that Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent journalist from Saudi Arabia, was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last week by a Saudi team sent “specifically for the murder,” two people with knowledge of the probe said Saturday.

Saudi Arabia had vehemently denied that Khashoggi, who contributed to The Washington Post’s Global Opinions section, was detained after he entered the mission.

Eventually, Trump would fail to respond to the killing as required by the Magnitsky Act, and Jared Kushner would get a cool $2B from the Saudi Government, approved over objections from the Saudi Investment fund by MBS, the man who ordered Khashoggi’s murder. The Washington Post brought us all those stories without fear.

Before 2022, my relationship with the Post was as a consumer, but with the leak of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, it became personal. I penned an opinion essay about the ramifications of the Dobbs decision on active duty service members trapped in states with anti-abortion trigger laws on the books. The Washington Post picked it up and published it:

Overturning Roe v. Wade could have disastrous consequences for the U.S. armed forces, and here’s how I know: When I was 21, I was drugged and raped violently while serving in the military, a crime that resulted in pregnancy.

Had I not had access to abortion, the assault would have ended my career and derailed my life. Should Roe be overturned and access to abortion restricted for female service members across the United States, military readiness would be directly affected.

This will immediately affect active-duty service members, who don’t exactly get to choose what state they serve in, and who don’t have the freedom to travel to other states without a leave “chit” approved up the chain of command — a command that is notoriously bad at dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault. Of the 20,500 service members sexually assaulted in 2018, only one-third reported the assault, and 43 percent of those who did said it was a negative experience.

In a world without Roe, service members without ready access to abortion care would be trapped. A service member who is raped and becomes pregnant could essentially be forced by the government to carry their pregnancy to term and give birth to their rapist’s baby.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin should create policy granting leave for reproductive-health travel, and President Biden should call on the Defense Department to put that policy into practice.

The piece garnered so much attention when it was released online, that the Post decided to include it in its print edition. I was so excited I ran down to a newsstand on publication day, only to learn they don’t print the Post anywhere but DC. Later that month, the piece would join three others as editor’s picks, and I eventually secured a hardcopy from the paper itself.

Just five months later, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memorandum ordering the Pentagon to grant leave for non-covered reproductive care:

To ensure that we can recruit, retain, and maintain the readiness of a highly qualified force and mitigate the practical effects identified above, I am directing the Department to:

• Create uniform Department of Defense policy that allows for appropriate administrative absence consistent with applicable federal law for non-covered reproductive health care.

• Establish travel and transportation allowances for Service members and their dependents, as appropriate and consistent with applicable federal law and operational requirements, and as necessary amend any applicable travel regulations, to facilitate official travel to access noncovered reproductive health care that is unavailable within the local area of a Service member's permanent duty station.

Thanks to the Washington Post, I was able to bring this issue to light and affect real change that would save lives and protect national security and military readiness. I’m not sure it was my opinion piece that swayed the Secretary of Defense, but when I met Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain at the White House later that year, he immediately recognized me as the person who had written it, and thanked me. He told me that the President had read it, and it had made a real difference.

That will probably go down as the single most important thing I’ve done, and I did it in partnership with the Washington Post.

Fast forward to 2024 and the campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’d been selected to be among the 225 content creators to cover the Democratic National Convention. The Washington Post itself covered it, writing:

In a move that could add to a recent surge in online support for Kamala Harris, the Democratic National Convention later this month will host hundreds of online content creators. More than 200 creators with large followings on TikTok, YouTube and other platforms have already been issued credentials to attend the Chicago event, according to convention organizers.

Recent studies have found that many voters in the United States have relatively low trust in traditional media. At the same time, content creators have become a major source of news, information and entertainment for many — especially young people.

But when it came time to endorse a candidate, The Post failed us. Again, from the Washington Post itself:

The Washington Post’s publisher said Friday that the paper will not make an endorsement in this year’s presidential contest, for the first time in 36 years, or in future presidential races.

The decision, announced 11 days before an election that most polls show as too close to call, drew immediate and heated condemnation from a wide swath of subscribers, political figures and media commentators. Robert Kagan, a longtime Post columnist and editor-at-large in the opinion department, resigned in protest, and a group of 11 Washington Post columnists co-signed an article condemning the decision. Angry readers and sources flooded the email inboxes of numerous staffers with complaints.

The paper had already been on a downward trajectory since Bezos hired Rupert Murdoch lackey Will Lewis to run the paper starting in January 2024. NPR wrote about it in late 2023:

A very different picture of Lewis emerges from material presented in London courtrooms in recent months and reviewed by NPR. The man picked to lead the Post — a paper with the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" — stands accused of helping to lead a massive cover-up of criminal activity when he was acting outside public view.

But the decision to pull the endorsement for Kamala Harris was the final straw for me. I cancelled my subscription, along with 250,000 people. And since then, there has been a mass exodus of talent from the paper. Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Ann Telneas resigned after the paper refused to publish her cartoon depicting Bezos and other billionaires bowing down to Trump alongside a prostrate Mickey Mouse - a commentary on Disney’s ABC dropping its defamation suit and giving $15M to Donald Trump.

Top talent continued to abandon ship including Jen Rubin, Phil Rucker, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Hannah Allam, and Tyler Pager. The Post’s online views dropped by more than half, and reported losing $100M, leading to massive layoffs. That exodus led to 400 staffers penning a letter to Jeff Bezos this week saying “we are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave, with more departures imminent.”

And despite all of that, Bezos will sit on the dais with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during Trump’s inauguration.

And during the paper’s final act, they’ve decided to rebrand as palace intrigue garbage that will rival the New York Post:

The Washington Post, which adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, is now pushing a new mission statement to its employees as Trump prepares to take office for a second time, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

Concocted as an “internal rallying point” for staff and not currently meant to replace the paper’s public slogan, the new statement reads: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

What was once one of the most influential and important newspapers in America will inevitably end up in grocery store checkout lines as a celeb rag full of “riveting story telling” that will be a kitten’s breath away from re-upping the Batboy saga.

Breakups are hard, but when your ex acts a fool, it reminds you that you made the right decision.

~AG