OPINION:
I don’t like taking issue with other columnists, especially someone such as Peggy Noonan, a seasoned pro who once wrote speeches for President Reagan and writes a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal.
Still, her Feb. 7 piece, “A Lament for the Washington Post,” sounds like she is mourning somebody who hasn’t died.
For one thing, The Post is still publishing daily, albeit in a tightened format and without key elements, such as a sports section staff.
In her Journal piece, Ms. Noonan cites Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote about preferring newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. So does any lover of liberty. Journalists are supposed to keep government in check, not empower it.
However, The Post has done the opposite, cheerleading for an ever-growing federal government at the expense of the rest of society. It has championed every single destructive trend in sexuality, thus weakening marriage, family, churches and other community foundations. When these institutions fall apart, government grows to pick up the pieces.
The primary vehicle for expanding government is The Post’s relentless reportage on “victims” who need government assistance and therefore bigger, more intrusive Washington-based bureaucracies to come to their rescue. At times, the paper reads like a Democratic Party/federal bureaucrat newsletter, and a particularly shrill one at that.
Eighty- to 90-inch stories on the “victim,” topped off with a plea for greater government intervention, are still The Post’s daily fare, despite owner Jeff Bezos’ recent reigning in and broadening of the leftist opinion pages.
The stark reality is that for the past few years, The Post has catered to far-left readers. When the paper took a turn back toward the center by not endorsing Kamala Harris and by running free market editorials, those readers reacted with fury, with thousands canceling their subscriptions.
Ms. Noonan laments the loss of “the one major newspaper left in the great nation’s capital.” She doesn’t spend even one word on the far more credible Washington Times, the alternative paper with a conservative commentary section (for which I write a weekly column).
The Washington Times began publishing a print edition on weekdays in 1982, and in 1985, it added a Sunday print edition. In 2009, the paper scaled back to five weekdays in print. It has remained an online news source 24/7, 365 days a week.
Although it has often done superb reporting over the years, especially on national security, The Times has never won a Pulitzer. That’s because the prizes, determined by a panel of legacy media, go to woke-themed stories favored by the left.
In fact, the leftist bias is so deep-seated that The New York Times still won’t give up its 1932 Pulitzer awarded to its reporter Walter Duranty, who was found to have deliberately covered up the Soviet genocide in Ukraine.
If Duranty were reporting today, he would probably file a piece on how Russians are sending missiles to help Ukrainian farmers plow wheat fields and are thoughtfully wrecking power stations as temperatures plummet below zero.
Like Ms. Noonan, I lament the decline of newspapers, but I won’t shed any tears if legacy media outlets such as The Post are cut down to size. They are so consumed by ideological bias that their reporters have become euphemism-spouting caricatures instead of truth tellers.
It’s especially obvious on coverage of social issues such as abortion (“reproductive health care”) and the LGBTQ agenda. If you don’t think so, try reading one of their “gender-affirming” articles involving a sexually confused young person referred to throughout as “they” or “them.”
On Super Bowl Sunday, with the Winter Olympics in full swing, what’s left of The Post’s sports section featured a two-thirds front page lamenting the absence of Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who led players in sitting or taking a knee during “The Star-Spangled Banner” 10 years ago to protest “police violence and racial injustice.”
This spread to other sports until fed-up coaches and owners pulled the plug, reminding players that fans pay to see them for their athletic abilities, not their woke views on the crisis of the day. Many Americans felt this way at the time: Would it kill these highly paid performers to at least stand with dignity during the national anthem?
In the lead of the piece, The Post’s Adam Kilgore wrote of Mr. Kaepernick, “The most relevant figure to Super Bowl LX is absent from it.” Yet, somehow, the Super Bowl went on as scheduled.
The Post’s masthead still declares, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
In a woke newsroom, so do grammar, plain English and common sense.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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