The Left Just Doesn't Understand Why WaPo Is Failing

They say ignorance is bliss, but for Leftists, feigning ignorance is a political tool. By pretending not to understand their opponents' political arguments, they stifle all discourse. I suppose that's a better alternative to their authoritarian efforts to censor, silence, and criminalize speech they don't like, but it's no less frustrating.

It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.
— Millennial Woes (@MillennialWoes) February 22, 2025

As the Left continues to reel from the mass layoffs at The Washington Post, they've not only attacked owner Jeff Bezos for having the audacity not to turn WaPo into a charity for wayward journalists who specialize in the inherent racism of climate change, but they demonstrate they have no idea just how out of touch WaPo was with readers in a nation where 77 million people voted for Donald Trump.

That's where Max Tani, a "media editor" with Semafor, comes in. He took umbrage with a piece by Charles C.W. Cooke, who described the outrage over the WaPo layoffs as "annoying." Cooke is right, of course, and here's how Cooke explained it (emphasis added):

Don't believe me? Click through one of those posts, scroll past the pinned advertisement for the newspaper's union, and look up the user's name in the Post's archive. If you do, you'll typically learn that the person who is being praised as a "brilliant" and "talented" journalist who did "great work" has a job description like "sits at the intersection of civil rights and cooking," and that they wrote four things in the last two months, and that two of them were about how alligators are racist. This — not the second coming of Shakespeare — is what Jeff Bezos is supposed to pay for in perpetuity as penance for having been a useful member of society.

That, dear reader, is what we call hyperbole. But it's true. In 2021, WaPo ran a story about how the names of birds are....drumroll please...racist. The reporter who penned that, Darryl Fears, was a reporter for "national environmental justice and climate" at WaPo.

It wasn't the first time WaPo wrote something so outlandish. Their other efforts included articles titled "Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked," "NFL faces pressure from Congress to change Redskins' name," and "How Republicans used misleading videos to attack Biden in a 24-hour period."

I had a few productive exchanges with these readers on the subject so I could better troubleshoot their issues. My conclusion? What’s “exotic” to you isn’t “exotic” to my neighbor, might not be “exotic” to my mom, probably wouldn’t be “exotic” to my best friend.
The first problem with the word is that, probably within the past two decades, it has lost its essential meaning. The second, more crucial problem is that its use, particularly as applied to food, indirectly lengthens the metaphysical distance between one group of humans and another, and, in so doing, reinforces xenophobia and racism

Perhaps the problem is that the WaPo, like so many media outlets, has become so insanely Leftist that the stuff they write and believe sounds like parody, too absurd to be real. Not too long ago, actor Patton Oswald demonstrated this when he was told California didn't want to put gender on birth certificates.

Bill Maher leaves his guest visibly dumbfounded after yanking him out of his liberal bubble.

Patton Oswalt couldn’t believe what he was hearing: “I’m sorry, I don’t remember [the left doing] that.”

That’s when Bill Maher told him why his blind spot was so massive: “Because it… pic.twitter.com/7YUSnQoBCl
— Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) November 17, 2025

Maher called it the "Blue Sky bubble."

The only way places like WaPo even begin to recover their credibility and, with it, their profits and jobs is to burst that bubble. CBS, under the leadership of Bari Weiss, is attempting to do so by rebranding "CBS Evening News" to focus on rebuilding viewer trust. She's being attacked for doing it, but it's paying off. For the week ending January 30, the program saw 13 percent growth in viewers and 26 percent growth among the coveted 25-54-year-old demographic.

This isn't complicated, no matter how hard the Left pretends not to understand. When outlets trade actual journalism for activism, curiosity for condescension, and reporting for DNC stenography, readers leave. WaPo's layoffs are not some great injustice or attack on the free press; they're the predictable and entirely foreseeable consequence of substituting ideology for journalism. The only thing more remarkable than WaPo's collapse is the Left's continued feigned ignorance about why it happened in the first place.