The Washington Post looks to be on a steady decline over the last few years. What was once one of the most popular and influential publications in the world, it increasingly looks like a publication on a worrisome downfall. This trend has only been reinforced by the recent revelations of the steep decline in web traffic the publication has had since 2021. It has recently been revealed by Semafor that the Washington Post has lost a staggering 60% of its web traffic since 2021.
Semafor revealed that the Post’s website traffic dropped from around 22.5 million daily visitors in 2021 to around 2.5 million daily visitors in 2024, based on internal data seen by Semafor. That is in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars the Washington Post loses each year. All in all, this paints a very bleak picture for the future of the Washington Post.
The paper is losing so many of its subscribers and has not been profitable for many years at the point, making it dependent on its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, subsidising its financial losses. However, perhaps the worst thing for the paper, like much of the media today, is that it has lost the trust of many readers. The unfortunate reality is that trust in the media is at an all-time low in general, and papers like the Washington Post are really at the forefront of this kind of distrust.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s first electoral victory in the 2016 election, the Washington Post took a very adversarial approach towards dealing with Trump and his administration. In their endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the Post’s editorial board described Trump as being “uniquely unqualified as a presidential candidate.” In response to this sort of coverage, Donald Trump would lash out at the Washington Post and other American mainstream media outlets he accused of being biased against him and his administration.
The Washington Post would even adopt the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” not long into the administration of Donald Trump in early 2017. The Post was not the only outlet that had a very adversarial relationship with the Trump administration, numerous mainstream outlets would draw the ire of Donald Trump over the course of his administration. This in turn led to a lack of trust forming between conservatives and Trump supporters with a lot of the legacy media outlets.
In response, we have seen the emergence of new media, which many right-wingers have managed to capitalise on as an alternative to legacy media outlets. In the years following the election of the first Trump administration, we have seen the rise of numerous right wing media and conservative content on social media and within the podcasting sphere. With the rise of these alternatives, the distrust that many conservatives and right-wingers have had for legacy media outlets has only grown.
Coupled with the fact that many legacy media outlets would at times cover Trump in very uncharitable ways. While it is true that Donald Trump is often guilty of peddling misinformation, it is also true that media outlets have at times been guilty of finding the least charitable way of covering him as well
So basically, over the last few years many right-wingers have completely turned their backs on most legacy media outlets at this point. Which in turn has meant that the majority of the viewers of most legacy media outlets have been liberals and progressives. A 2022 YouGov poll revealed that Democrats are generally more likely to trust mainstream media outlets compared to Republicans.
That same poll found that while 61% of Democrats trusted the Washington Post, only 16% of Republicans trust in the publication. That same sort of trend could be seen with other publications like the New York Times, which the poll states is trusted by 63% of Democrats but only 14% of Republicans. Or even CNN, which the poll found was trusted by 66% of Democrats compared to only 11% of Republicans. Only Fox News was one of the few mainstream outlets trusted by Republicans at 53% but only 19% of Democrats stated that they have trust in Fox News.
What this tells us is that many of America’s legacy media outlets have been mainly talking to the liberals and progressives in the Democratic Party, and many right-wingers have been getting their news elsewhere. A big reason for this was because following Donald Trump’s first victory in the 2016 election, papers like the Washington Post and other legacy outlets had basically framed themselves as being part of the resistance against Trump, standing up for democracy, and the audiences they cultivated have been people who are interested in that kind of reporting.
However, over the last few years, we have begun to witness a shift among American legacy media outlets. More and more we have seen these outlets attempt to reverse course and appeal more towards the centre. The reasoning behind this is varied: whether they are attempting to win back some of the audience they have lost over the years; or they are attempting to not draw the ire of Trump or Republicans in office. There has definitely been a shift towards appealing more towards the centre.
We have seen this with CNN, for example, which had an extremely adversarial relationship with Trump over the course of his first term in office. So much so, Trump would often go on tirades describing CNN as “fake news.” However, after experiencing falling viewership and a new leadership taking over the business, CNN began to try to appeal more towards the centre. In doing so, it had laid off some of its very anti-Trump news anchors, such as Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo.
However, this pivot towards the centre was a source of major backlash by the audience it had cultivated over the years, which is very anti-Trump. They accuse CNN of selling out and “playing both sides” at the expense of American democracy. Moreover, it’s not as if right-wingers are flocking back to CNN. Many still view CNN as a biased news network and will likely never have full trust in their coverage again. So they have only managed to alienate both sides of the political spectrum with their actions.
The latest iteration of this phenomenon came in the shape of the Washington Post deciding against endorsing Kamala Harris for President. The motivation behind this decision by owner Jeff Bezos was to try to make the Washington Post appear less biased to news consumers and appeal more towards the centre. However, that decision ran contrary to the views of the audience the Washington Post has built up over the course of many years, who are very progressive and very anti-Trump. And in response, we saw around 200 000 Washington Post readers cancel their subscriptions to the paper.
We had seen a similar story play out with the LA Times after they decided against publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris as well. Another example has been of Joe Scarborough, the co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC, a staunch Donald Trump critic, going and having a meeting with Donald Trump following his election victory, to the fury of many of his viewers. Even the New York Times has been regularly criticised by progressives for “playing both sides.”
This is one of the many challenges facing the media in the modern day. Increasingly, audiences prefer to have their opinions be reinforced by the media they consume. The media landscape has shifted dramatically and increasingly more and more people are in their own media bubbles, which has come at the expense of legacy media outlets. This has caused a huge shift in the way the media industry can operate and, if we are being honest, legacy media outlets definitely haven’t done themselves any favours in the manner in which they have operated in this new media landscape.
