Washington Post, RIP
Washington Post, RIP
They don’t call ’em “good old days” for nothing.
Bob Woodward’s birthday falls on the 26th of March. There will be 83 candles on the cake and much to celebrate. Woodward has had a long, productive, and admirable life as a newspaperman and author. For more than half a century, he has worked at the Washington Post, so it is understandable that he is “crushed” by recent developments at the paper. More than 300 journalists employed there have been laid off in recent days, including reporters in India and the Middle East. Its weekly book section is also getting the ol’ heave-ho.
These moves under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013, are getting a great deal of coverage, almost all of it brutal. Bezos has “killed” the Post, it was “murder,” a “bloodletting,” a “bloodbath.” The man has gobs of money, so why should people in his employ, like hundreds of other Washington journalists, end up in the soup line? As an ink-stained wretch myself, I feel for them. But I’m not sure I should mourn more for them than for millions of other Americans trying to meet the mortgage, much less pay their kids’ college tuition.
No question, the Post has been a great newspaper, but, like other great newspapers, it has been hemorrhaging money for years, in part because it has been losing subscribers. It’s ironic that a lot of the people now bemoaning decisions made by the Post’s top brass are themselves no longer subscribing. After Bezos decided to pull the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (ending a practice of endorsing presidential candidates, which it only began to do about the time Woodward was a Metro desk reporter), 250,000 high-minded subscribers bailed out.
They did so no doubt unaware of how their decision might affect the paychecks of reporters about whom they are now expressing such heartfelt concern. Subscriptions typically run about $140 a year, which means, by one calculation, that their cancellations are costing the paper $35 million a year. That’s more than enough, it would seem to me, to pay all 13 of its “climate change” reporters—and the salary of the one whose sole beat was “race disparity.” There might even be a few bucks left over.
In many ways, I am also sorry that the Post is struggling. I have good memories of it myself, and not just as a reader. Back in 1974, when Woodward was still on the Metro desk and the Post’s offices were in a building demolished in 2016, I was there, too, as a college kid on an internship. Those were heady times.
Carl Bernstein’s desk was a few yards from mine, and Woodward’s wasn’t far from his. The editor Ben Bradlee would strut around the newsroom, and every day brought closed-door meetings resulting in new stories about the Watergate break-in. Nixon supporters didn’t like it, and there were picket lines out front.
On August 8, one of the editors—it wasn’t Bradlee—got the attention of the entire newsroom. He told us that President Richard Nixon would be making a major televised address that night, the purpose of which was to announce his decision to resign from office the next day. Contrary to what those same Nixon supporters might have imagined, there was no jubilation in the newsroom. There was, if anything, a reverent hush, borne of a sense that something of historic importance was about to happen, and the Post newsroom had a lot to do with it.
We were then dispatched to different parts of the city, to watch Tricky Dick’s speech, to notice how it was received, and to call in “color” to the Metro desk editors. I was sent to what was then known as the Kennedy Center. The Bolshoi Ballet was performing, and Nixon’s speech was aired during intermission. What struck me was how many members of that well-dressed crowd responded not at all as the people in the Post newsroom did, but with jeers and laughter. I found a pay phone in the lobby and reported as much.
Think about that. You had to carry change so you could use pay phones. That’s how you got in touch with your editors, or if you were on the street, with your sources. Reporters back then used something called typewriters. There was a kind of conveyor belt gizmo in the newsroom, suspended above the desks. Stories were typed on paper that seemed to have at least six other sheets attached to it, and when you finished a story, you tore off one of the sheets, attached it to the conveyor belt, and sent it on its merry way to copy editors and rewrite men. You didn’t fax your stories, much less email them. You sent a “hard copy.”
Newsroom veterans—“grizzled,” you might say—could gather around your desk, read what you were writing over your shoulder and make sardonic remarks about it. Nobody back then was instructed to treat younger workers with respect, much less “to learn from” them. This wasn’t the newsroom of the hard drinking, wise-cracking Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Front Page, but it was closer to that world, I’m guessing, than to ours. I remember it fondly, even when it was my prose that was being read aloud to other reporters and ridiculed.
That was a long time ago. The Post’s flush times have come and gone, which is true for all print newspapers. They aren’t being murdered, as the owners’ critics insist. There was a time, as Marshall McLuhan said, when people would “step into [their newspaper] every morning like a hot bath.” Those days are gone. People don’t even take hot baths in the morning. They shower. All that might be regrettable, in some respects, but it does nobody any good to pretend it’s not true. People choose to get their news in different ways today, as McLuhan knew they would, and that’s exciting too.
If you want to get nostalgic about the world of the Post’s heyday, watch All the President’s Men, which was released just two years after Nixon’s downfall. Woodward and Bernstein were played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, with Jason Robards as Bradlee. I’ve seen the movie countless times, and while it accurately depicts that time and place, not once can an actor playing me be seen anywhere in it. Believe me, I’ve checked and will check again. Other than that, it’s great.
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