New Frontiers of Darkness

The Washington Post has unveiled its new slogan to supplement (in practice, supplant) the old "Democracy Dies in Darkness": "Riveting Storytelling for All of America."

I can't tell you how much I hate this.

First of all, even out of context, it sounds both comically corporate and unbearably patronizing. "Riveting storytelling for all of America" sounds like how to market the Scholastic Book Fairs for emerging readers, not one of America's papers of record.

But of course, we must take this slogan in context. And the context is the Post spending the last few months humiliating itself and dynamiting its journalistic credibility by repeated acts of groveling towards the MAGA movement.

And I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but this slogan really encapsulates the media's self-delusion that it is part of the liberal family. Again, recall my thesis here: the media thinks its main audience is liberals, and so it sees its job as to challenge liberals with "alternative perspectives" or "competing views" (as opposed to just telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may). One implication of this is that conservatives are a growth audience (because of course the Post in its prior manifestation couldn't be speaking to them) -- this is what "for all of America" means. We're no longer speaking just to the latte-sipping coastal elites, but to all of America. And lest you think I'm projecting, they're being quite explicit that this is what they mean:

Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has made comments in line with the new mission statement in conversations with Post journalists in recent years, according to two people familiar with those discussions. Mr. Bezos has expressed hopes that The Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding The Post’s audience among conservatives, the people said.

Now nominally, recognizing that conservatives are part of the audience could mean that the Post starts committing to telling them things they don't want to hear. For example, they could be informed, in no uncertain terms, how Trump's tariffs will crush working families with spiraling grocery bills. Or they could be told, in clear-eyed fashion, of how Trump's inner circle is proposing increasingly fascistic and lawless abuses of government power. Or they could be shown, without varnish or spin, how the Republican Party has begun to view sexual assault and rape as virtues in its political leaders -- not even a secret to be ashamed of, but as an affirmative basis for support and promotion.

But of course, we all know that is not what Bezos and his cronies have in mind. "Riveting storytelling" suggests that what they want is sensation and soothing -- to reaffirm their (new) readers' priors, never to challenge them with something as dirty and discomforting as the truth. Conservatives can't tolerate hearing that Donald Trump was a grotesquely unsuitable choice for the presidency, and so the Post (even in its editorial endorsements) won't aggravate them. The Post knows that many if not most of Trump's cabinet picks fail the most basic (by the Post's own lights!) criteria of qualification for office in a democratic society -- respecting the outcomes of a democratic process -- and so the Post will just pretend it doesn't matter.

The Scholastic Book Fair analogy is more than snark, for this is of a piece with the broader trend of infantilizing the American right. Conservatives, once again, are being treated as children, and spoiled children as that -- whatever junk keeps their attention, that's what will be provided. 

A once great newspaper, reduced to an entertaining diversion for spoiled, coddled brats. Maybe the slogan isn't so bad after all.