White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Requiem for The Washington Post

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Think of a big-city newspaper as being analogous to a department store. You can get anything you want there, from breaking political news to dinner recipes. When you pick it up, you should be enchanted by the multiplicity of its offerings.

Think of big-city newspapers as you think of the way every city had its own particular and dearly loved emporium like Marshall Fields in Chicago, Bloomingdale’s in New York, and Garfinkel’s in Washington.

For decades, Washington’s great newspaper has been The Washington Post. In recent years, along with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, it has also been one of the three newspapers that can claim to be national.

The Post offered everything from history-changing exclusives to the daily horoscope. And great reporting and commentary.

Now it is going from being a great department store to a convenience store, selling bread, milk and cigarettes — actually, politics and business with limited international coverage.

Having once worked at the Post, I feel this personally, as though a part of my life is being taken away.

I am shattered by the folly and the waste. I am also alarmed that now The New York Times will be too powerful with its online dominance. It got the internet right early.

Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post from the Graham family, failed to catch the wave. Instead, he was seen as being more concerned with placating President Trump. Betrayal, said much of the readership, who cancelled their subscriptions or stopped believing in the paper, despite some courageous and insightful journalism.

The seeds of the Post’s commercial success were sown in 1954. At that time, afternoon newspapers were dominant and morning papers were struggling. In the morning, Washington had the Post and the Times Herald. In the afternoon, it had the Washington Evening Star and the Washington Daily News.

Eugene Meyer, a financier, bought the Post in 1933. By all reports, he thought of it as a diversion. I am told he liked to bring bottles of whiskey to the paper and have impromptu parties with the ever-thirsty staff.

In March 1954, Meyer bought the Times Herald and folded it into the Post.

What wasn’t known was that television would soon shift the balance between morning and afternoon papers, and that afternoon papers would go into permanent decline and extinction.

Both the Star and the News in Washington were battling each other for the read-at-home market. Soon, those readers would be watching television.

Under Meyer’s daughter, Katharine Graham, the Post reached unbelievable heights in journalism and in wealth. It appeared invincible.

Just as television had doomed afternoon papers, technology was to threaten all traditional publishing and broadcasting. New media, such as Facebook and Google, delivered personalized advertisements directly to consumers, cheaply and effectively.

As the red ink spread, it was up to Donald Graham, Katharine’s son, to find an angel, someone to stave off bankruptcy, and follow the early example set by the Times of virtual publishing. He persuaded Amazon’s billionaire founder, Bezos, to buy the Post to save it. Ironical?

A word about Graham: I met him when he first came to the Post. I was asked to show him around the composing room. It was the beating heart of the paper, where the newsroom’s creative output was set in hot metal and assembled in steel frames, known as forms, that would become the pages.

I got on well with him, and we became friends. It must have been extraordinarily painful for him to sell the Post, to entrust it to a man with the money to keep it going until a new business plan paid off.

It began well. Bezos kept his distance until he, like other giants of business, felt he had to mollify Trump, ever a media critic.

The extent of Trump’s pressure became clear when Bezos canceled the publication of an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president. Emotions were running high, and it was seen by the Post faithful as betrayal: the hand of Trump in the temple of press freedom.

Subsequently, Bezos added insult by changing the direction of the Post’s admired opinion pages, undermining confidence in the readership and the staff.

You can change the product lineup in a retail outlet, but you will burn down the building if you do it in a newspaper.

The Washington Post of old was venerated for fearlessness; now it is despised as craven. It is gone, sunk, a wonderful memory for those who read it, and for those who worked there. R.I.P.

How Trump and Technology Have Turned the Press Corps From Lions to Hyenas

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Political messaging isn’t what it used to be. Far from it. It used to be that the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times were an agenda for action. This power was feared and used by successive presidents in my time, from Lyndon Johnson to Joe Biden, but not by Donald Trump.

Before Trump, there were several ways a president spoke to the nation. He either made a speech, held a press conference or leaked an idea to one of the two newspapers that counted in the Washington firmament, The Times and The Post. If that balloon floated upward, something formal followed.

Until Bill Clinton, that was often a speech at the National Press Club, a few blocks from the White House. Clinton never gave a major speech at the Press Club. That was the end of an era, the end of the Press Club as the forum of choice for presidents and heads of state.

In Clinton’s case, this wasn’t a failing of the Press Club system; it was just that it had become cumbersome and unnecessary. Clinton said it was simpler for him to talk to the nation from the White House formally in a press conference in the East Room. Less formally, he could walk into the Brady Briefing Room, where the press was on duty all day and the network cameras were ready to roll.

Technology was changing the way news came out of the White House. While Clinton preferred press conferences or informal presentations, the two dominant newspapers were essential tools to him, as they had been and would be to other presidents until technology again changed things.

I watched the system of trial-by-leak from the Johnson through the Biden years, although things were somewhat different under Bush. There was a new newspaper in town, The Washington Times, which was avowedly conservative, which caused George W. Bush’s staff to lean that way.

However, the new paper didn’t change the system in which a top White House correspondent would be leaked a story. If it failed, it wasn’t heard about again; it would either die in the aridity of silence, or it could be mildly denied as “speculation.”

None of this was ever laid out formally, but it worked and worked for a long time. It gave the president cover and the reporter a payoff with “access.”

With Trump, things are different, primarily because of his seemingly narcotic addiction to publicity but also because technology has bypassed the media of old: the newspapers and the hungry cameras.

Trump has Truth Social, and his aides have X. He makes announcements all the time, changes direction, denies former positions and doesn’t test ideas before sharing them. It is dangerous and giddy, but clearly, it delights Trump.

It has created the kind of yo-yo of yes-no-yes-perhaps that we have seen most recently with Trump’s statements about whether he would or wouldn’t try to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.

The now-nightly Niagara Falls of unformed presidential thinking on Truth Social has changed the role of the press corps.

From leading the day’s news to following it, the press corps has seen its role change and its significance diminished. The media giants are now forced to follow like hyenas, not hunt like lions. They are following the hunt, not heading it.

Whereas when ideas were tested through media, presidents could be saved from some of their worst inclinations, now there is no restraint, not even the thin membrane provided by a diligent press secretary, suggesting caution or at least preceding thought.

From his early days in real estate in New York, Trump has craved publicity, grooved on it, and seen it as an end in itself more than a means to an end.

In a naive moment when the National Press Building was in financial trouble, which was at one time owned mainly by the Press Club, I suggested to some colleagues that we sell the building to Trump — not Trump the politician but pre-political Trump.

Fortunately, some of my colleagues had dealt with Trump and knew about his media bullying — he would even call into New York radio talk shows and talk about himself as though he was someone else — and warned that our lives would be hell and the club would be used by Trump, if he could, to glorify himself.

Now, we see Trump converting the Oval Office, heretofore an inner sanctum, into a kind of television studio, himself enthroned at the center.

The U.S. Is Great Now, Leads Envious World

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Don’t look if you don’t want to, but America is great now. Right now, this week, this day, this hour, this second.

Our economy is the envy of the world. Our mobility, socially and for work, is without equal. Our capacity to foster start-up business is without comparison. Our ability to lure the best talent and the most creative people around the world astounds our competitors.

We are a beacon for the best and smartest the world over.

Our technological abilities are formidable, from space travel to artificial intelligence. If the political class doesn’t fail it, America has a future that suggests wonders yet to come in creativity, in wealth creation, in standard of living, in better health, and in the overall human condition.

AI holds the promise of a new age for humanity, led by America, with greater productivity per worker and the elimination of much dead-end work.

The London-based, global magazine, The Economist, in a paean to this nation, stated in its latest edition: “Over the past three decades America has left the rest of the rich world in the dust. In 1990 it accounted for about two- fifths of the GDP of the G7. Today it makes up half. Output per person is now about 30 percent higher than in Western Europe and Canada, and 60 percent higher than in Japan — gaps that have roughly doubled since 1990.

“Mississippi may be America’s poorest state, but its hard-working residents earn, on average, more than Brits, Canadians or Germans. Lately, China too has gone backwards. Having closed in rapidly on America in the years before the pandemic, its nominal GDP has slipped from about three-quarters of America’s in 2021 to two-thirds today.”

It is possible to believe that we are on the threshold of  a new golden age. Yet we are just ending a political campaign where self-denigration has been a feature. The economic ideas of both candidates, if they become policy and law, threaten to jeopardize our ascent to what Winston Churchill called the “sunlit uplands.”

Kamala Harris has put forward a few ideas which have failed in the past, like protecting specific American industries and fighting the shibboleth of “price-gouging.” Who will she go after? Hotels, airlines, and electric utilities, which buy and sell in the wholesale market, all depend on opportunistic pricing. A free market is by its very nature opportunistic.

Down the line, Harris has sought to fix that which the market will repair by itself. Richard Nixon — wise in so much — tried price controls and failed hopelessly.

Housing is an example of where Harris’ plans to have the government interfere will achieve the opposite result to what she is seeking to do. She would give first-time buyers a down payment. That will most likely push up prices in the overheated housing market. What is needed is more houses, which means local restrictions need to be eased.

Donald Trump’s central economic idea is worthy of the kind of economic thinking favored by African dictators the day after a coup. His tariffs would impose a massive de facto sales tax on all Americans, push up inflation, and wreck the global trading system.

If there are reputable economists who endorse the tariff mania, let us hear from them. Where are they hiding? Even the Trump-friendly think tanks, like The Heritage Foundation, have shied away from this misguided enthusiasm. It is dangerous and if Trump is elected, Congress needs to aggressively restrain it.

Both candidates have laid out economic plans which are risible at some level and aimed to protect their voting blocs. Both, in their way, seek to buy their votes with promises which they either can’t deliver on or which would wreak havoc.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, the 18th-century Scottish jurist, saw doom for democracies when the money faucet is turned on. He said, “A democracy will exist until such time as the public discovers that it can vote itself generous gifts from the public purse.”

One might add, “or if leaders promise it such gifts.”

America is at a high point and can continue to climb if its politicians don’t arrest the ascent.

Glimpses of Times When There Was More Respect, Everywhere

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I can’t explain all the social and political maelstrom I have seen through the years. But I have known times when crime was far less than it is today, and political disputation, in all its forms, wasn’t a cause of violence in the population.

Here are some fragments of the changes I have seen in different places. I parade these fragments from my life because of the sense of doom, the sense that violence could break out between the political extremes in the United States. In effect, we haven’t seen the end of the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

When I was a teenager in the 1950s in the Central African Federation, a long-forgotten grouping of three British colonies in central Africa — (Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia; and Nyasaland, now Malawi), the prime minister, Sir Roy Welensky, lived two miles up the road from my parents. Every school day, he would pull over his big black car, a Humber Super Snipe, and give me a lift to school.

He had no chauffeur, no security, and no sense that it was needed. Those were times when society was placid — not just placid, but very placid.

When I left school at 16 and became a reporter, the prime minister would drive me into Salisbury (now Harare), the capital, which was very useful. Often, he would pick up other car-less people, without regard to color, and drive them as far as the unguarded government buildings that housed his office.

There was no violence.

I hitch-hiked all over the federation and down to Johannesburg in the neighboring Republic of South Africa. No thought of personal safety ever crossed my mind. It would be unsafe and unwise to attempt that today. That peacefulness continued until the Zimbabwe war of independence, which started within a decade.

In 1960, I was in London, covering the legendary East End, an immigrant and working-class area. Peace reigned. I walked through the roughest dockside at midnight and later with no fear or concern for my safety. The only memory I have of being interrupted was by prostitutes enquiring whether I needed company.

At that time, one could walk up to the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street without being stopped. A single, unarmed policeman was all there was for security.

Now, you can’t get near No. 10. Political violence and just malicious violence is everywhere. Street crime, muggings and knife attacks are common all over London.

I was in New York during the Northeast Blackout of 1965. I had to walk across the 59th Street Bridge into Queens to make sure the gas was turned off in a printing plant that belonged to a partner of mine in a publishing venture. There was no looting, no threat of violence. Indeed, there was a party atmosphere, and statistics show that many children were conceived during it.

By contrast, there was extensive looting and crime during the city’s major blackouts in 1977 and 2003. An ugly social indifference to each other had come into play.

I was in Rio de Janeiro in 1967, and after having partied late into the night, I walked the backstreets of the city without fear. The last time I was in Rio in the 1990s, security personnel would prevent you from leaving your hotel after dark and caution you not to walk alone during the day.

When riots broke out in Washington and elsewhere in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., there was massive rioting, but the anger was against property. I walked around the city during the riot, particularly on 14th Street, its epicenter. Several rioters, loaded with looted goods, suggested where it might be best for me to walk or stand to avoid being knocked over by the surging crowds.

There was still a kind of social peace, a respect for one individual for another.

Fast forward to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There was no such respect, either for people or the building and what it stands for, just mob anger.

About the U.S. Capitol: In 1968, it was easily approached and entered. You could take a taxi to the entrance under the archway, either on the Senate side or the House side, and walk in.

I offer these fragments from my own experience and pose the question that I can’t answer: How did we get to the state of social and criminal rage that is a global reality?