When Slogan Becomes Epitaph

Growing up in suburban Washington D.C., I not only read the Washington Post but also delivered it during all four years of high school. That was how I managed to get through four years of college without a mountain of debt.

I was proud of the newspaper, because it was as fearless as it was professional in hammering the powerful and the wealthy for their abuses of their authority and privilege. Even before I “graduated” to reading the front section when I was older, I always looked for Herb Block’s editorial cartoons. He inspired me at age 14 to ink my first cartoon and then go on to become my high school newspaper’s editorial cartoonist and eventually editor-in-chief.

That was over 40 years ago, and it saddens me to see how its current owner, the world’s fourth wealthiest man, has all but destroyed it. Having recently laid off 300 reporters on top of neutering its editorial staff, Jeff Bezos’ depravity reminds me of that of the vampire squid hedge fund managers who would use leveraged buyouts of ailing corporations to suck them dry, shedding workers and then selling off whatever assets remained for scrap while taking a ginormous tax write off.

But this wasn’t just another company that had been overtaken by competitors or had been poorly managed. The Washington post was one of the country’s top print media outlets, a daily record of the sausage making operation we call the U.S. federal government. And now it’s been reduced to a sad shell of its former self, crippled and muted so that he bloated orange sack of dog excrement that currently occupies the White House won’t be irritated by its inconvenient fact-based reporting.

I guess it turned out that the Post’s “Democracy dies in darkness” wasn’t so much the Post’s slogan as its own epitaph.