Alright I'll admit it -- I spend too much time fulminating over the Washington Post. But it's been dropped at my doorstep every morning for over 25 years, so I tend to take it personally. The decline of the Post's editorial page into something just this side of a den of reaction both saddens and infuriates me.
Thus I enjoyed the recent description of the Post's Op-Ed staff by Ombudsperson Deborah Howell ("Little Debbie" to me and low-tech cyclist) in which she concludes that it is too male, too white and too old. (No wonder it seems like a Republican Party adjunct at times.) What she failed to note is that it is also absurdly right wing for the readership it serves. Howell describes the Post's lineup as follows -- conservatives: George Will, Robert Novak, Michael Gerson and Charles Krauthammer; liberals: Richard Cohen, E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson and Harold Meyerson -- unaffiliated: David Broder, Anne Applebaum, Ruth Marcus, Jim Hoagland, David Ignatius, Sebastian Mallaby and Robert Samuelson.
Let's start with the low-hanging fruit. Mallaby and Samuelson -- if these two are centrists than I am Michelle Malkin's love toy. Seriously, to claim that utter free market ideologues such as these two are not conservatives gives you some sense of just how warped the ideological lenses are at the Post. Applebaum is still fighting Stalin and the Cold War, Ignatius is a classic Washington moron, Hoagland a status quo maven (whom I think I'd call a conservative if I could stay awake through one of his columns), and Marcus and Broder can reasonably characterized as centrists -- although Broder's centrism is of the stripe that always hurts liberals. Of course all of the alleged centrists, including Broder and Marcus, are obsessed with entitled reform, i.e. benefit cuts for average people.
Cohen is a special case -- I will briefly summarize his output -- wank, wank, wank, scary black people scare me, wank, wank, wank, scary Muslims scare me, wank, wank, wank, I am funny, wank, wank, wank, no really I am, wank, wank, wank, black people should denounce scary black people who scare me, wank, wank, wank, hey baby if I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me, wank, wank, wank, you don't have a scary black or Muslim boyfriend do you.
The Post has one writer under the age of 40 who contributes to its Op-Ed page -- Peter Fucking Beinhart. I'm younger than Peter Beinhart for Christ's sake -- at least where it counts. Amazingly enough, Howell seems to imply that it would just be too hard to find non-old, non-white male voices. (I actually don't care that much about the age, sex or race of the contributors -- I'd just like to see some unabashed people of the left on the page -- even if they need to exhume Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington to accomplish this.)
In light of all of this, you might assume that I felt a frisson of schadenfreude (if that's possible) upon reading of buyouts and layoffs at the Post. But you would be wrong -- the Post still does some first class reporting, from the disclosure of the CIA's black interrogation sites to the uncovering of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed. I have no illusions that newspapers will be effectively replaced by blogs -- yes, I can bloviate in a more intelligent fashion than Richard Cohen, but what does that get us? I don't want the Post to become obsolete. I would like to see it get its head out of its ass -- and get bolder, broader and better. And not afraid to be a progressive voice for a progressive audience instead of this weirdly conservative, war mongering rag. It would not only be good for the city and the country, it would be good for business.
