9 ms·
I'm quitting the Washington Post
- MY1999518 2y ago[flagged]
- spaceisballer 2y agoSadly as the author stated, it may not matter. But even Tim Cook is giving a million to Trump’s fund. The President is going to the highest bidder, but who cares because big tech will profit right?
- tekla 2y ago[flagged]
- genem 2y ago[flagged]
- tekla 2y agoHow is it whataboutism when you claim a election was bought, when the loser out raised and outspent the winner?
- brigandish 2y agoSold! To the lowest bidder…
- curt15 2y agoHarris is not in a position of power.
- brigandish 2y agoThe standard given is "The President is going to the highest bidder", Harris not being in power therefore refutes the point.
- tekla 2y agoTrump was literally a rando private citizen. Harris was VP. She was in a position of power.
- krapp 2y agoTrump was not a "rando private citizen." He was a former President, a celebrity and a billionaire. Trump was far, far more well known than Harris, and arguably more connected to political power. VP is not a powerful position. It's well known for being almost entirely pointless, unless the President dies.
- CrazyStat 2y agoTeddy Roosevelt’s opponents within the Republican party orchestrated his selection as vice president specifically to get him out of the way because they didn’t like what he was doing as governor of New York and figured that was a safe place to dump him. Then President McKinley was assassinated a few months later.
- bdangubic 2y agoTrump is rando private citizen as much Obama is rando private citizen :)
- outside1234 2y agoOnly if you don't include Elon dumping hundreds of millions into the campaign. And I am sure there is a lot more where that came from in terms of "contributions" from Russia and China in terms of disinformation.
- tekla 2y agohttps://www.cnn.com/2024/12/05/politics/elon-musk-trump-campaign-finance-filings/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/05/politics/elon-musk-trump-camp... Irrelevant. Harris still outraised funds than Trump
- bdangubic 2y agolol @ 5-1 :)
- etc-hosts 2y agoTo me the difference there seems to be an incredible amount of large pools of money and billionaires publicly committing 100s of millions of dollar each to PACs, totally billions and billions, that clearly 100 percent exist to get Trump elected, but of course no PAC would ever think about aligning their activities with the Trump campaign because that would be against the law. But Harris did raise a billion dollars, it is true.
- snowwrestler 2y agoHarris raised $1.1B hard money and benefited from $843M declared outside spend. Trump raised $463M hard money and benefited from $975M declared outside spend. Numbers per OpenSecrets.org
- dtquad 2y ago>Kamala Harris outraised Trump 5-1 That is not true. Harris raised $1.39 billion and Trump raised $1.09 billion.
- rvz 2y agoThat ship has sailed given how Harris and other 83+ billionaires (including several other tech CEOs) raised more than $1BN for her campaign more than Trump (and she still lost).
- AlexandrB 2y ago> But even Tim Cook is giving a million to Trump’s fund. I think you mean "Tim Apple".
- esafak 2y agoThis is such an innocuous cartoon. I can't believe it would be an issue in this age.
- idiotsecant 2y agoI certainly believe it would be an issue. When your boss is one of the supplicants depicted in the cartoon it makes for an uncomfortable conflict of interests for the editor. We are not a post-oligarch society. We have a thin veneer of democracy now, but the decisions that really matter are made while rolling around in giant piles of $$$.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoBezos was upset his moneybag was depicted so small.
- meta_x_ai 2y agoWhy wasn't such cartoon made when Mark Zuckerberg donated $400 million to essentially increase Get-out-to-vote in essentially largely democratic areas. Delusional to think the WP and NYT journalists are coming at this at a highly non-partisan way. The entire mainstream media is Anti-Trump, Anti-GOP. I remember how MSM treated Javier Millei as the next hitler
- etc-hosts 2y ago> Why wasn't such cartoon made when Mark Zuckerberg donated $400 million to essentially increase Get-out-to-vote in essentially largely democratic areas. untrue.
- hipadev23 2y ago> The entire mainstream media is Anti-Trump, Anti-GOP. Fox Corp, News Corp, Sinclair Broadcasting, and Newsmax would like to have a word with you about your lack of recognition.
- meta_x_ai 2y ago[flagged]
- DiscourseFan 2y agoHow does one build an audience on Substack anyway? It seems most of the successful authors there already had an outlet and a following in a major publication and took their readers with them.
- hammock 2y agoTwitter
- DiscourseFan 2y agoSeems contradictory to build an audience for long-form content from short form work.
- fullshark 2y agoTweets are brand advertisements.
- renewiltord 2y agoIt’s not. Long-form is easy to write. Every school kid specializes in expanding text into larger volumes. In an essay for my scriptures class I replaced “Jesus” with “Jesus, the only begotten son of God, who gave his life so that we might be saved from our sins” to make the word count. The key is to follow long-form writers who can be succinct. The quality of concise communication of concepts then flows into their longer writing.
- mandmandam 2y agoDoes it? Books catch attention with a cover, with interviews, with reviews. Building an audience requires a lot more work than people expect, and people's attention span is the shortest its ever been.
- femiagbabiaka 2y agoIt's not building an audience for long-form content, it's cultivating an ingroup of a particular ideological tendency that will absorb any content from the ingroup.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoI'm not sure exactly what a "free press" looks like, but I'm damn sure they've been sleeping or dead longer than I've been alive. Of all people, journalists should be able to point out our blatant contradictions in terms of supposed values and norms. But instead they're slavish institutional midwits. Thank you for this post, OP.
- speerer 2y agoSomewhat difficult to notice in a skim the article (but important) is that one of the figures criticized is Jeff Bezos, who owns the newspaper in question.
- krsdcbl 2y agoI didn't feel that way, since she specifically points it out and also explains (quite correctly) why this matter is to be treated differently for a newspaper than for any other business
- speerer 2y agoOh it wasn't a criticism of the article!
- rsynnott 2y agoI mean, if anything that _should_ make the paper _more_ wary about spiking it. It’s a bad look. Like, even the WSJ, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, not known as one of the more committed-to-integrity media magnates, didn’t spike the Theranos story, even though Murdoch was one of Holmes’ dupes.
- exogeny 2y agoReminscient of the Rob Rogers situation at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he was fired for making too many cartoons critical of Trump when the owner was a Republican nepobaby. So lame.
- outside1234 2y ago[flagged]
- ARandomerDude 2y agoBring back the good old days when Biden was "sharp as a tack"?
- AlexandrB 2y agoDo you mean Hunter Biden or... I'm a lifelong leftie, but it's been shocking to see how the press no longer holds power to account if it has a "D" in front of it. This obsequiousness has made the Democrats all the weaker. Someone grilling the party on Biden's health at the beginning of 2024 might have meant a real primary and a better candidate in the general. Iron sharpens iron and all that.
- GiorgioG 2y agoYou think this is new?
- Mistletoe 2y agoThe boot licking towards Trump and donations to the inauguration etc. have truly turned my stomach this time. Feels like we are living in the Dark Ages and giving bribes to a dark lord. At least have some self respect.
- GiorgioG 2y agoWhat boggles my mind is that anyone is surprised by this. All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.
- ivewonyoung 2y agoWhy only this time? It didn't turn your stomach when corporates donated to Biden's inauguration?
- paxunix 2y agoIt's that the guy who won this time is a horrible human being and is the head of a party that seems barely interested in governing, but more in enriching themselves even if it means sacrificing rights and privileges of those they govern. The guy that won last time is not as horrible a human being and was interested in governing for all Americans. So when the oligarch heads of companies decide to donate to the new guy's big party, it's tantamount to simply ignoring all the truly shitty things the new guy and his party have done and have said they're going to do, because it's more important to the oligarchs that the real power in the land[1] look favourably upon them and their designs. It has been made abundantly clear that currying that favour costs money. [1] Make no mistake, the US government is more powerful than all of the tech companies in the country and its new leader intends to wield that power as capriciously as he sees fit.
- zephyrus1985 2y agoThis is from a fairly left wing publication and it's clear who had more billionaires supporters https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/10/30/kamala-harris-has-more-billionaires-prominently-backing-her-than-trump-bezos-and-griffin-weigh-in-updated/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/10/30/kamala-har...
- davidw 2y agoI feel like the current political situation in the US is going to accelerate the demise of traditional media. They have not been able to adapt to a changing information landscape and were stuck on models that worked in the past, like "both sides"ing issues sort of reflexively. That works great with a lot of things like "how much should we tax companies?", but not so much for some more fundamental questions like whether someone supports democracy. I'm not sure what will emerge in its place. It's a big problem, and has hit hardest and first among local newspapers which are increasingly hollowed out husks of their former selves. This has a real cost to society that's actually quantifiable in dollars and cents: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-closures-of-local-newspaper-increase-local-government-borrowing-costs/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-closures-of-local-new... Things like social media don't really take the place of people paid to do the hard work of, say, sitting through local city council meetings and making sense of what's happening there. A friend of mine tried doing that for fun and it lasted a few years, but he got burned out because of the tremendous amount of work.
- nothercastle 2y agoThere is nothing to accelerate. Traditional news media is dead. The only thing that’s left is a tabloid shell.
- ClownsAbound 2y ago[dead]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoBS, if anything it's complicated. Local news is in decline but publications like The Atlantic are growing.
- davidw 2y agoThere are a number of really good reporters at places like the Washington Post and the New York Times. As much as those institutions do have problems, and are declining, they still have the money and resources to do good work. So, no, they are not dead, but certainly not headed in a good direction.
- stickfigure 2y agoI like the concept of the cartoon, and the message, but it lacks something - humor, a surprise, something unexpected? It seems kind of bland. I wonder if it was rejected because it was just not interesting enough.
- davidw 2y agoIt's not a 10/10; I've seen better. But if the person in question quit over it, I suspect it wasn't just because they were asked to rework it, something they've probably been asked to do in the past because something wasn't clear or funny or something.
- probably_wrong 2y agoIf newspapers started rejecting political cartoons for not being funny then barely any would be left standing. I imagine that coming up with a good topical joke every day that can be told in exactly one picture is not easy, so I can believe that it's more about a good average. At least this one respects the reader. Other artists would probably write "privacy" and "consumer rights" in the money bags.
- in_cahoots 2y agoThis is the rough version. I’m assuming the final one was never drawn.
- ivewonyoung 2y agoHer other cartoons are similar: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/ann-telnaes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/ann-telnaes/ Inane bland partisan slop.
- paulmooreparks 2y agoI told my daughters this when they were growing up: Never forget that the purpose of news media is NOT to inform. The purpose of news media is to sell advertising. Once you keep that in mind, you should become a lot less gullible about accepting what you see in the media.
- slig 2y agoI'm going to tell mine: their objective is to sell propaganda, both in a literal and a figurative way.
- tensor 2y agoI’m going to tell mine: the only thing worse than news media is random internet comments. They’re either propaganda, lies, or snake oil.
- synecdoche 2y agoInternet comments are generally not masquerading as news.
- gaws 2y agoWhere do your daughters get their news?
- throw__away7391 2y ago> As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. I am so sick of the self aggrandizement across the board that seems to have become especially prominent over the past couple of years. I am certain I am not the only one. A cartoon in the Washington Post is at best preaching to the choir. Not a single "powerful person or institution" in history has ever even once been "held accountable" by a Washington Post cartoon. So, so many people have such an inflated sense of the importance of what they do, like they're on some holy crusade. I am reminded of that scene at the beginning of Silicon Valley, "I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place", and all the cringy Steve Jobs impersonators we've all seen over the years. In my opinion these kinds of people are exactly the reason that the same people being "held accountable" in the cartoon have managed to come to power. Because they've been putting themselves out there as unlikable self-righteous snobs for the better part of the past decade or so and a whole lot of people got sick of them and put the idiots in charge out of spite. Also...it's a very lame cartoon. It isn't remotely funny nor creative. It's bland, innocuous commentary on the level of Banksy. Though I guess that's pretty much the status quo for political cartoons these days.
- threatofrain 2y agoWait, it's snobbish to think that a business should be more than money and power? And this snobbishness is so damaging, so awful, that in a conversation about holding power to account, we should instead be thinking about putting the snobs in their place? How dare a cartoonist think that a business should be more than an instrument of money? Like yo, I don't agree at all that news media should be held to a higher standard, absolutely not higher than Marlboro or DuPont (if they're supposed to be a wing of government then make it so!), but to think "Let's turn this conversation around. Instead of Jeff Bezos, it's time to put the magnifying glass on the snob cartoonist", I mean, okay, sure.
- clearcoat 2y agoIt really sounds like you’re part of the problem.
- canistel 2y agoReminded me of the Satish Acharya incident in India years back. https://www.firstpost.com/india/drop-cartoon-take-photo-cartoonist-satish-acharya-alleges-mail-today-editors-censorship-forced-him-to-quit-4951511.html https://www.firstpost.com/india/drop-cartoon-take-photo-cart... India has since slid many slots down in the World Press Freedom Index, and now stands almost near the bottom end.
- dtquad 2y ago[dead]
- imglorp 2y agoThe list of CEOs paying tribute lengthened. https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/3/24335290/apple-donation-donald-trump-inauguration-tim-cook https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/3/24335290/apple-donation-do...
- drawnnqrtrd 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cavisne 2y agoThis is the authors other cartoons FWIW https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/ann-telnaes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/ann-telnaes/ It must be pretty boring drawing donald trump twice a week for the majority if your career....
- boomboomsubban 2y agoIt's probably less boring than drawing Garfield seven days a week.
- like_any_other 2y agoI applaud the cartoonist's principled stance, but she greatly overestimates how free the press is (or was) just because she'd never had a point of view censored. In the words of Noam Chomsky: I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting. Yes, her viewpoint wasn't censored up until now, but on the other hand, the Washington Post sure didn't employ anyone remotely similar to e.g. Jared Taylor or Keith Woods.
- edanm 2y agoThat's kind of true, but also, there really is a difference between everything is allowed all the time and the current situation the cartoonist is gesturing at. I read it as "the Overton window for what is acceptable discourse has shrunk in a way that is dangerous", which I quite agree with.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> she greatly overestimates how free the press is (or was) just because she'd never had a point of view censored I don't know if she had any illusions about it being completely free before, but the point is that it's clearly heading in the direction of "less free" as a direct consequence of corporate interests owning media and concerns about financial blowbacks from a vindictive president not against the news org itself but other companies held by the news org's owners. That is a huge problem.
- Over2Chars 2y ago[flagged]
- tlhunter 2y agoGuy?
- Over2Chars 2y agoSorry did I commit a hate crime by mis-gendering some sophisticated intelligent soul who didn't realize that mocking your employer in public will get you censored, or more likely fired?
- benreesman 2y agoIt concerns me how much of the commentary here is about this or that partisan argument. If Harris had won we’d have those policies for a maximum of eight years, as it stands we’ll have these policies for a maximum of four. Bezos will be buying newspapers and pushing out journalism critical of him for decades. He’ll be further monopolizing everything from retail to cloud compute in defiance of antitrust law, and further lobbying at this scale, and further privatizing space travel, and all the godawful shit that these guys either have done or clearly plan to for decades, there is no term limit on unaccountable billionaire with monopoly pricing power and arbitrary campaign financing apparatus. This or that president for one term is just irrelevant at such scale and scope and duration.
- rsanek 2y ago> Bezos will be buying newspapers and pushing out journalism critical of him for decades Bezos bought WaPo over a decade ago. I don't see any reason to expect that he's going to radically increase his pace of acquisition.
- benreesman 2y agoThe pace of unapologetic interference in the modern day “press” and politics by Big Tech zillionaires is accelerating faster than a Cyber truck: these motherfuckers tweet and detail budget bills now. Ellison is in the press saying that ubiquitous “AI” surveillance will keep citizens on their best behavior. Historians will draw some arbitrary line on some date about when this went completely parabolic fascist. It will be something like right now.
- davidw 2y agoThis is a great point. A significant part of the problem right now is the 'oligarch' aspect.
- benreesman 2y agoIt’s the entire problem to a first approximation. The difference between red and blue is really very small on this scale: Bernie Sanders and Laura Loomer are aligned on X. And my original post shot up a few points and is now getting buried, per typical, because it’s part of the social contract around here that we scrutinize everything except unchecked techno optimism.
- smitty1e 2y ago> Over the years I have watched my overseas colleagues risk their livelihoods and sometimes even their lives to expose injustices and hold their countries’ leaders accountable. I think that this is true as far as it goes. What is increasingly apparent is that, while the press in the U.S. is nominally "free", the Three Letter Acronym agencies have been calling a lot of shots for a long time. Disappointing, but unsurprising in retrospect. There doesn't seem to be an easy answer. The internet looks like a win, but not so fast: we can assume everything we post here is going to be fed into some LLM somewhere. When we go to fill out some important application in life (say, a job as a cartoonist) does HR run a query to find out if we are sufficiently "diverse"? How do we enjoy the rich fruit of liberty without Orwellian side effects? The obvious answer would be to subscribe to Ann's Substack. Except that I haven't supported the WaPo's POV for years. Someone whom I do support is Jeff Goldstein => https://substack.com/@proteinwisdom https://substack.com/@proteinwisdom
- JohnBooty 2y agoIf I read the linked post with images disabled, I might have agreed entirely with the cartoonist. I certainly think this is an important thing to call out, because it sucks: The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. But when you look at the image... something doesn't line up here: There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations This isn't a cartoon with Biden handing them piles of money, or Uncle Sam handing these guys money, or... I don't know... the aforementioned group of CEOs groveling or fighting for a dollar bill dangled on a fishing line by Trump. This is a cartoon with those dudes handing Trump himself piles of money directly. Like a direct bribe. Which is the exact opposite of what she claims to be attempting to criticize, which is about "men with lucrative government contracts" ie money flowing in the other direction. Corporate and private donors do definitely line the pockets of politicians, a little more indirectly. That is a big problem and maybe it's part of what she wanted to convey. Feels like she's on the right side of things, but it doesn't feel like good execution.
- CamperBob2 2y agoThis is a cartoon with those dudes handing Trump himself piles of money directly. Like a direct bribe. Which is what is happening. Tim Cook just pledged $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund, for instance: https://www.yahoo.com/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-donating-225620975.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-donating-22562... They are literally paying tribute.
- JohnBooty 2y agoThey are literally paying tribute. If you ask me they're the same thing, or close to the same thing. And both suck. Legally they're quite distinct though and I can see why an editor would push back. I guess it also depends on what the "killing" of the cartoon was like. Request for a rework? A "don't touch this topic, don't cartoon Bezos?" I dunno.
- orsenthil 2y agoI think, the cartoon was probably killed because it left out many others?
- mmooss 2y agoI've read that the Atlantic is building up a Washington newsroom and is hiring Washington Post journalists who resign. As they used to be a monthly magazine, that would be a big change, but I suppose it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when leading journalism in the capital suddenly abdicates and starts shedding talent.
- gaws 2y agoWhat's interesting is none of the jobs The Atlantic is giving former Washington Post writers are listed on its career website. Does the magazine conjure an opening when they want to hire someone?
- mmooss 2y agoWhy must they publicize openings? They aren't a government agency.
- gaws 2y agoThe Atlantic is based in Washington, D.C., and they are required to post job listing for open positions. It could be that they listed the jobs for Parker and Scherer for a day then took it down after they accepted.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deskr 2y ago"Of the 4,700 newspapers published in Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933, no more that 1,100 remained. Approximately half were still in the hands of private or institutional owners, but these newspapers operated in strict compliance with government press laws and published material only in accordance with directives issued by the Ministry of Propaganda." -- https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-press-in-the-third-reich#toward-the-end-of-world-war-ii-3 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-press-...
- SebFender 2y agoI'm quitting pieces on why people are quitting.