Glenn Kessler States the Obvious About the Washington Post

Glenn Kessler was the Washington Post’s fact-checker and had been at the paper for several decades. Two weeks ago he took the buyout offer and resigned. In a substack post published last week, Kessler described what led up to his resignation. He describes a meeting he had last April with the paper’s new publisher, Will Lewis. Lewis wanted to pick Kessler’s brain about how to appeal to a broader audience.

During our discussion, he asked me: “What should The Post do to appeal more to Fox News viewers?”

I used to cover diplomacy so I knew how to keep a poker face even as the hair on the back of my neck prickled. “We have to remain true to our journalistic principles,” I said. “We have to tell the truth.” I paused, and added, “They may not like that, because it would conflict with what they’ve been hearing.”

After throwing Fox News viewers under the bus as people who might not like the truth, Kessler admits the Post’s left-wing readers are the same. In fact they are far more likely to complain if he tells them something different from what they’ve been hearing.

I don’t recall seeing a survey but I suspect the vast majority of Washington Post readers are left-leaning. Writing The Fact Checker since 2011, I often received a slew of angry emails whenever I harshly rated a Democratic politician for making a false claim. The more Pinocchios — our rating system for falsehoods — the more I would be dismissed as a right-wing hack.

“Why don’t you fact-check Donald Trump?” readers would ask — even though I did on a regular basis. By contrast, readers rarely said I was unfair when I fact-checked Republicans.

This is one fact I don’t ever remember reading in his fact-checks. The Post’s readers are mostly left-wing, to the point that he couldn’t imagine how the publisher’s attempts to appear to a broader audience could possibly work. Appealing to people on the right would certainly create a strong reaction from the current readers who were mostly on the left.

In other words, conservatives were an untapped market for growth, especially for a news organization where traffic was falling. But there’s a conundrum: if most of your readers are liberal, how do you attract conservatives without losing your existing base? Some features, of course, are beyond politics, such as sports or cooking. But the core of The Post’s brand — what allowed us to go toe to toe with the bigger New York Times — was a relentless, scoopy focus on politics and the federal government.

And The Washington Post readers who cared about politics and the federal government? Most of them are liberal and probably would never watch Fox News.

Kessler was right, of course. The Post’s subscribers had a revolt when Jeff Bezos wouldn’t let the paper publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris last year.

The Post’s liberal readers viewed it as a move to curry favor with Trump, and 300,000 canceled their subscriptions within days — 12 percent of total digital subscriptions. Another 75,000 people canceled when Bezos then announced in February that the opinion page would pivot to defending personal liberties and the free market. Not necessarily conservative but certainly libertarian. His announcement indicated liberal voices would not be welcome on the editorial pages, suggesting a squelching of rigorous debate.

That’s his prerogative. But, in terms of building readership, the new editorial policy didn’t make sense. The Post’s liberal columnists generated huge traffic — that’s because of the liberal slant of the readership — and now they’ve all quit. Every day, I checked the daily traffic numbers and, year over year, it was like being on a waterslide — with no bottom.

The liberal columnists there did generate huge traffic because they were all surfing the same anti-Trump wave which had worked well for a lot of news outlets since 2016. There really was no way to change that because that same audience of left-wing readers would not tolerate any dissent. Many of them would rather abandon the paper entirely than see it move to the center.

Now that he’s no longer getting a Post paycheck, Kessler can state the obvious. Despite it’s pretensions to saving democracy from darkness, the Post has long been a liberal paper written for a uniformly liberal audience. Anything else didn’t fit in and still doesn’t.