When the Press Chose Sides
Editor's Note
American journalism did not drift leftward by accident, nor did it do so all at once. As this essay from Jude Russo shows, the press’s political alignment reflects decades of structural change — in labor, education, audience composition, and party polarization — that have gradually transformed news institutions into factional actors.
In a period of cold civil conflict, when shared assumptions about authority and legitimacy have frayed, media outlets won’t limit themselves to reporting on political divisions; they’ll tend to operate within them. The Washington Post’s recent turmoil illustrates the limits of technocratic reform in an ecosystem shaped by ideological sorting and market incentives. Russo’s essay examines how journalism chose sides, why that choice proved durable, and why reversing it may be far more difficult than critics assume.
Grim news from the nation’s capital. The Washington Post, the city’s paper of record, is getting clobbered. Per a June report in the independent Washington City Paper, WaPo’s daily print circulation is down from 250,000 in 2020 to 97,000; weekend print circulation is down to 160,000. These losses have provoked a major reorganization of the physical product, encompassing a consolidation of the Metro, Style, and Sports sections.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Elite media institutions were expected to consolidate authority during the Trump years, not bleed it. In a period often described as an emergency for liberal democracy, the assumption was that the nation’s flagship papers would become indispensable arbiters rather than partisan instruments.
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon tycoon, took over the Post in 2013 and placed it under the management of Martin Baron, the well-respected former editor of The Boston Globe. Traditional journalism didn’t look like much of a business winner then, but it is occasionally useful (if you can afford it) to have a pet newspaper for unforeseen contingencies. And from the newspaper side, getting taken over by the man with the largest checkbook in the world (or close to it) is not a bad sort of job security in an ailing industry. Then the greatest industry windfall of our lifetimes happened. The Trump era has been a bonanza for those media properties that have been sharp enough to capitalize, even when it comes only to their physical products; The Atlantic reported in 2024 a growing print circulation of over a million and, even more miraculously, true profitability.
Yet this prosperity was uneven, accruing primarily to outlets that aligned themselves clearly with one side of an increasingly polarized national struggle. In the emerging cold civil conflict, media institutions discovered that intensity could substitute for breadth — but only within defined political camps.
The Post initially reaped the benefits, albeit perhaps at the price of broad respectability; the tagline “Democracy dies in darkness,” a response to President Trump’s supposed creeping authoritarianism, earned a great deal of flak from the half of the country that did not regard the new political order as a prelude to fascism. Bezos evidently noticed that his pet newspaper was scaring the horses and began to intervene. After the Post declined to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, a number of writers resigned from the editorial board (although, it must be observed, they did not quit their jobs — even in these strange and disorienting times, mammon still has its charms). The non-endorsement also caused an exodus of paying readers; roughly 250,000 canceled their subscriptions, around 10 percent of the total subscriber pool at the time. (Like most publications, the Post is primarily a digital outfit these days.) After Trump’s electoral victory, a number of high-profile commentators left the Post, most notably the neoconservative-turned-Bidenite columnist Jennifer Rubin.
But the centrist reign of terror continued. In February 2025, Bezos inaugurated an explicitly moderate editorial line. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets…. I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void,” Bezos wrote in a memo to the staff. This announcement — an assertion of the most anodyne Americanism possible — met the ire of the newsroom. The opinion editor David Shipley, a former Clinton speechwriter whose main contribution to American letters is a book about how to write emails, resigned and took his no doubt considerable talents elsewhere.
And we are back to the Post’s tanking circulation numbers. A newspaper or magazine has any number of goals in its coverage, but usually one is to sell subscriptions; this is a measure not only of financial health but of reach and influence. There is something prima facie very odd going on here.
The paper has gone out of its way to make its commentary more palatable to a broader portion of the public, but the portion of the public willing to pay for it has diminished.
This is troubling. A common talking point has been that the bias of the mainstream media — “the Megaphone” for leftist agendas — is a persistent problem in realizing a right-wing program in the United States. Why the mainstream media tilts left has been less thoroughly examined. The ongoing Post fiasco suggests that the problem runs deeper and is more complicated than a mere matter of getting more moderate people in charge and purging ideologues from the rolls. Maybe people like a sinister tendency in their news.
How the Press Became Left-Wing
One of the questions that has plagued the Right for decades is why the mainstream press is so left-wing and so Democratic. This has not always been the case. Any given early-20th-century volume of W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, a trade directory listing (at least in aspiration) all the circulating publications in the United States, contains hundreds or thousands of entries for papers and magazines with a “Conservative” or “Republican” political or partisan tilt.
Nor were these limited to local or regional publications. Henry Luce’s sprawling media collection was the pillar of a particular sort of interventionist, anti-communist Americanism that became one of the dominant strains of the Cold War Right. A child of missionaries to China, Luce put Chiang Kai-shek on TIME’s red-bordered cover ten times; in a manifesto in Life, he inaugurated America’s era of empire — that is, euphemistically, “the American Century.”
But Luce’s strain of right-leaning ideology was, at least into the ’50s, not the only one on offer. Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune was a reservoir for older tendencies in the American Right; indeed, McCormick was so ill at ease with the moderate Republican Party of Eisenhower that he changed the Tribune’s listed partisan affiliation in the Ayer Directory to “independent.”
There was a right-wing presence even in the tonier sort of publications. H. L. Mencken and the unhappy theater critic George Jean Nathan founded The American Mercury in 1924 as the literary successor to The Smart Set; despite the political tilt of Mencken and his successors, the magazine attracted contributions from serious talent, including Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson.
Clearly something changed — more precisely, some things. Some of these forces were economic or demographic; others reflected a gradual narrowing of permissible opinion as cultural authority centralized. Starting in the ’30s, a variety of structural dynamics conspired to pull the mainstream press to the left and, just as pertinently, to pull the Right away from the mainstream press.
The first and most open of these was trade unionism making inroads into the journalistic labor pool. In 1933, Joseph Cookman and Heywood Broun founded the American Newspaper Guild, a union for journalists and later other publication workers such as printers. Like its parent organizations — first the American Federation of Labor and then the Congress of Industrial Organizations (later to merge into the AFL-CIO we know today) — the Guild was left-wing. Broun himself ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, criticizing the Roosevelt administration from the left. (“I’d rather be right than Roosevelt” was his admittedly uninspiring campaign slogan.) In the period of union expansion in the United States, this embedded an organized left-wing pressure group into the newspaper business.
At the same time that trade unionism was exerting its explicit influence over the industry, the class composition of the scribbling pool itself was changing. College-educated writers began to enter the industry in growing numbers, bringing with them a more bourgeois, liberal tone. (In 1948, in the only recorded audio interview with Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore mused, “The idea of a newspaper reporter with any self-respect playing golf is to me almost inconceivable.”) The explosion of college attendance among the baby boomers and the subsequent scramble for desirable jobs — it has remained a constant that journalism jobs are, for a certain dissipated segment of the population, eminently desirable — accelerated this transformation.
This process is today all but complete; almost 97 percent of working journalists hold at least a bachelor’s degree. The ideological orientation of universities, particularly in the humanities departments that produce aspiring professional writers, has been written about at painful length and does not need to be reexamined here. It will suffice to note that one of the starkest divisions in the electorate is between those with four-year degrees and those without. Labor dynamics have dictated that journalists tend to be liberals; liberal journalists, of course, tend to write stories with a liberal cast.
The increasingly ideological character of the parties buttressed these tendencies. Mencken, although a man of the Right — a self-described libertarian, an admirer of Wilhelmine Germany, a proponent of capital punishment, an opponent of “uplift,” the New Deal, and Franklin Roosevelt, whom he dubbed “a fraud from snout to tail” — was nevertheless a Democrat: “In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.” He was at home writing weekly or even daily for the staunchly Democratic Baltimore Sun for most of his career. As the Democrats became more homogeneously liberal in the decades following the New Deal, Democratic papers followed the party and became more liberal. Liberal papers found themselves aligning more and more closely with the Democrats. This is what they call a vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on your point of view.
It was largely in response to the press hardening into a liberal monolith that William F. Buckley Jr., an occasional contributor to The American Mercury, founded National Review. (The Mercury might have carried the torch of conservative journalism were it not for organizationally disruptive editorial turnover in the ’40s and ’50s; who knows how things might have been different. Instead, the magazine’s later history was a regrettable embarrassment. In the ’50s it took on George Lincoln Rockwell, who went on to found the American Nazi Party, as a columnist. In 1978, the magazine ran a piece lamenting the death of Adolf Hitler. By the end of 1981 — probably to the relief of most conservatives — it was defunct.)
National Review and its successors attempted to challenge the increasingly liberal organs in the national market and, particularly in the early years, attracted real talent that was not highly ideologically marked, including Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe. But conservatives in journalism may be the victims of conservative journalism’s success. The creation of viable, explicitly right-wing organs provided an escape valve for right-leaning talent that otherwise might have leavened mainstream outlets. Their distinct ideological characters, particularly at the explicitly fusionist National Review, also cultivated a fractal dynamic. Much energy was devoted to suppressing deviation from favored theories, even when those deviations had significant popular support; more energy went into founding new publications to serve those deviations. Diffusion became dominant, and orthodoxies are not resilient foundations for large readerships. In the Trump era, the large movement-conservative publications found themselves weakened or discredited by their political irrelevance; Trump, after all, is not much of a movement conservative.
Why the Press Is Resistant to Reform
In 2025, thanks to the educational sort becoming increasingly homogeneous in ideological and partisan affiliation, there simply is a limited audience for conservative-leaning print journalism (a matter of lamentable significance, and significant lamentation for this author). Print media as a whole have been in free fall for two decades or more, and increasingly only the educated consume the written word; the educated are disproportionately liberal.
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is the only daily with a broadly conservative editorial line, but it is not the Murdoch property with the most pull among conservatives. Television, radio, and increasingly digital video have since the ’90s become the dominant media for the Right in America. Again, the vicious/virtuous cycle: the hardening liberalism of the vast majority of the press has only further alienated conservatives, pushing them toward media where the ideological environment is more congenial and allowing further hardening of press liberalism.
Bezos and other would-be press reformers are kicking against almost a century of industry history — not just against sinister efforts to suppress particular ideological tendencies, although there is certainly some of that sort of thing, but against secular dynamics in the labor pool and the market. This is laying aside the accidental fact that his own paper’s place in history — its legend, even — is Watergate; the Post wraps itself in the voluminous scalp of the late champion of the forces of reaction. It is difficult to fight a legend. Who are the conservatives and moderates who, hearing that the Post is in favor of personal and economic freedom, are going to sign up to replace the outraged leftists leaving the subscriber pool? It is entirely plausible that one could get to know them all; the numbers suggest there are not very many.
Of course, a thing can be done in better and worse ways. Putting a Limey in charge of straightening the place out was probably also a tactical misstep; the British press environment is vastly different and in many respects far healthier than the American. These Anglo-American crossover arrangements have a way of ending in tears. Half-measures also have a way of going awry. A more aggressive articulation of the new line and a more thoroughgoing purge of recalcitrant elements would probably have attracted somewhat more subscriber interest than an agenda a touch to the left of Paul Gigot. Nor did the paper add any prominent columnists representing the more dynamic elements of the Right. Bezos may be playing a game that is impossible to win, but he is playing it badly.
Yet the sad truth is that the underlying dynamics seem unlikely to change any time soon. Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they suggest easy solutions — smash the clique, make a few tweaks, and ride gloriously into the sunset. The truth tends to be more complicated, and more depressing. You cannot make more conservatives read, and you cannot make liberals want to read more conservatives. A moderate Washington Post may, per se, be a worthy project to undertake — perhaps a commitment to truth, skepticism, and all that jazz is simply good — but paying readers want no part of it. The Post, and the press at large, are unlikely to become less liberal any time soon.
It’s just bad business.