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The Washington Post: Perhaps not as compromised as we thought? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-02
I admit it: I still have a subscription to the Post. I have been reading it since I was about 7 years old, around the time of the Watergate scandal (which seems almost quaint now). I grew up in the DC area and my father was a federal employee for almost his entire working life. He would bring the paper home each day. Although I don’t remember doing this specifically, my father told me that I would look at the news coverage in the Post as one administration member after another was implicated, charged, or resigned and ask him questions about it: who was X, why were they in trouble. So I have a soft spot in my heart for the Post, despite Bezos’ pronouncements on changing it.
And yet — maybe it is not so completely compromised, so MAGA-fied, after all. As evidence, I offer the following news and opinion coverage from this last Sunday (3/30).
Front page,top of the fold:
“Group’s list targets activists for deportation”
The article discusses how Betar US, a “newly revived and rapidly growing” US chapter of a “militant Zionist group”, is claiming a share of responsibility for ICE targeting Columbia U grad student Mahmoud Khalil. The tone is factual and very much not cheerleading for this action.
“Trump tees up a major escalation in word trade war”
The article describes Trump’s moves as a “major escalation” and “aggressive measures.” Again, very factual and not slanted toward praising Trump’s tariff approach.
“Pentagon memo on priorities has Heritage’s fingerprints”
The article discusses a “secret internal guidance memo,” which orients US military priorities to preventing China from seizing Taiwan and to homeland defense while pulling back from Europe, and describes it as bearing “the fingerprints of the conservative Heritage Foundation” and as outlining “in sometimes partisan detail” Trump’s vision for a potential war with China. Again, very factual, and not slanted towards presenting Hegseth or Trump or the Heritage Foundation favorably.
Page 2, top of page: “The Sunday Take”, an opinion column by Dan Balz. The column title is
“Trump seeks takeover of elections in a bid for expanded presidential powers”
The first line is brutal: “Almost no part of government is immune from President Donald Trump’s thirst for power and control”, and Balz goes on to lambaste Trump’s executive order on election administration. The opposite of favorable coverage for Trump.
So the news pages and front of the paper are not showing, to my eye anyway, any pro-MAGA slant. What about the opinion pages? (Yes, I am aware that opinion writers do not select their own headlines).
Dana Milbank:
“MAGA solidarity is showing signs of fraying”
The tone is pretty much 100% negative towards Trump, discussing his “overreach” and “threats”.
Kathleen Parker:
“Under Trump, free speech is a right for the chosen”
Harshly critical of the seizures of foreign students and academics for practicing free speech.
Shaid Hamid:
“The beginning of the end of the Trump era”
Argues that Trump is squandering the chance he had to forge a durable Republican governing coalition after the election, and instead is incapable of understanding the transition from grievance to governance, making “domination itself” the “central organizing principle” of his second term, and handing Democrats the opportunity to reclaim the mantle of patriotism. Nothing positive for Trump here.
Bezos’ pledge to focus on the “pillars” of personal liberty and free markets does not seem, so far, to have translated into any kind of cheerleading from Trump. Which should not be surprising, considering that Hamid was correct: the Trump administration is about “domination”, not protecting free speech or reproductive freedom or any other kind of genuine personal liberty. I won’t be dropping my subscription just yet (though I consider the Post to definitely be on probation).
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