(Daily Caller) Clashes at The Washington Post (WaPo) between publisher Will Lewis and the company’s staff highlight a growing trend of activist-minded reporters butting heads with their business side throughout liberal media — and a stark decline in these outlets’ performances show their current model is simply not working.
Outlets like WaPo, The New York Times and NPR have all experienced high-profile inner conflicts between management and underlings in recent months. These battles underscore a shift in media where reporters see themselves as the vanguard for democracy rather than objective fact-finders, former employees and media analysts told the Daily Caller.
“I think what we’ve seen over the past decade as politics has become more ideological, is that no family, no institution, has been spared the consequences of things becoming more ideological,” Andy Mills, a former New York Times journalist who helped create their popular “The Daily” podcast, told the Caller.
The Post announced Executive Editor Sally Buzbee’s departure in May following a controversy involving Lewis. Lewis reportedly pushed back on Buzbee’s decision to cover an unflattering story about Lewis’ potential ties to a hacking scandal at The Telegraph. A judge was ruling on whether or not to allow Lewis’ name to go on a list of people involved in the incident. Lewis told Buzbee the story wasn’t newsworthy, according to The New York Times. Buzbee reportedly disagreed and the Post ultimately published an article about the judge’s decision to include Lewis on the list.
While widespread coverage of that incident suggests Lewis’ pushback might’ve been a factor in Buzbee’s exit, other reports posit that the company’s new direction, a decision to split the newsroom into three pieces and place Buzbee at the head of one, was the chief factor in her exit.
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 15: Executive Editor of the Washington Post Sally Buzbee speaks during the Washington Post Global Women’s Summit at the newspaper’s headquarters on November 15, 2022 in Washington, DC. The inaugural summit featured a collection of speakers ranging from activists to politicians gathered to discuss global issues through the perspectives of women. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Following Buzbee’s departure, Lewis held an all-hands meeting where senior employees openly criticized his decision not to hire a woman or person of color to replace Buzbee, Vanity Fair reported.
“The most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post, and we now have four white men running three newsrooms,” one reporter said during the meeting, according to a Vanity Fair source.
This obsession with identity politics within newsrooms is a relatively recent phenomenon, driven in part by the 2016 election of Donald Trump, NBC, CNN and Fox News veteran Steve Krakauer told the Caller. Krakauer is currently the executive producer of the Megyn Kelly show.
“There’s this nonstop focus on identity, the blanket term of coastal elites who are so out of touch,” Krakauer told the Caller. “It’s not necessarily even the youngest of the people there. I think it’s the people who are roughly the ones obsessed with being online.”
“If 80,000 people had voted differently in 2016, there would be a lot of problems that have developed from November 2016 that would not have come to be. I think that was this massive shockwave … Almost no one in these newsrooms in New York and D.C., who theoretically should be people who know what’s coming more than anyone, never saw it coming at all. They had absolutely no idea that Donald Trump had a potential chance of winning,” he continued
Lewis, who brought on veteran newsmen Matthew Murray and Robert Winnett to help replace Buzbee, reportedly slapped his staffers with a harsh reality.
