As rants go, this is a brief one, but as a trained journalist of the “old school” -– in those final, glorious days right before Woodward and Bernstein at, wait for it, the Washington Post, made it clear that reporters were also advocates, and that bringing down the president of the United States was more important than telling the truth. 

I graduated from the Honors Journalism Program at the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia in June of 1973, the same year that Watergate blew up, eventually costing Richard Nixon his presidency.

Please don’t get me wrong.  Nixon was wrong and needed to go, just as Clinton was wrong and needed to go.  However, the so-called journalists who led the fight against Nixon and his oddly appropriately-named Committee to Re-Elect the President – better known as CREEP – should have used the truth rather than grandstanding.  

Which is why, in a round-about way, I just this past week canceled my subscription to the Washington Post. 

Here’s the story:

Last week, Amazon billionaire and owner-and-publisher of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos, went public with a self-congratulatory announcement that the Opinion/Editorial page at his newspaper would now take an apolitical, middle-of-the-road position. 

No more would it lay claim to being the far-left advocate for all things woke and progressive, no matter how ridiculous they appear to mainstream Americans. 

While Bezos wants us to believe that he and his paper are once again in the lead, in fact his West Coast chief competitor, the Los Angeles Times, moved to de-fang their own Editorial page late in the most recent presidential election campaign.  

Still, the Washington Post’s sharp move to the center led the editorial page editor, David Shipley, to resign in disgust. 

Much of the mainstream media covered this move, and even though I should have known better, I was at least mildly welcoming of this move by Bezos. 

As I said, I should have known better. 

Intentional or not, this move was a bait-and-switch.  While the editorial page is no longer “officially” non-woke and non-progressive, and while -– like the LA Times, they will no longer support one presidential candidate over the others … and presumably apply this to other election campaigns the Post covers as well – the news pages have undergone no such transformation.

So, in my view, this was a bait-and-switch. 

It’s been decades since editorial pages at major American newspapers, all of them uniformly positioned to the Far Left, had any real impact on American elections or even politics. 

However, there are a few newspapers – the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post being in the lead among the 75 to 100 or so prominent daily newspapers -– that, by virtue of the way they cover the breaking news, tend to set the news agenda for the rest of the news media.  Chief among these is the New York Times, with the Washington Post and the LA Times close seconds.  When the network and cable news network news programs set their daily coverage, they first refer to their print “fellow travelers.”

And here is the bait-and-switch. 

While Bezos very publicly gutted his editorial page, stripping it of intentional bias, he said nothing about his daily news feed. 

Sure enough, the day after I heard about his editorial page’s “circumcision,” his news pages were still doing their best to gut the Trump administration like a fresh-caught trout.  Where it really matters – in the news story coverage – there have been no changes.

For a long time now, I’ve been at least skimming the daily headlines at the Big Three most liberally-biased newspapers, to see from whom the mainstream media – and the leaders in the Democrat party – will be taking their daily marching orders.

My initial reaction to the Bezos bait-and-switch was to cancel my electronic subscription.  But on reflection, I thought I’d give them a week.

O.K., a week’s passed by, and they are still a Far-Left leaning daily newspaper, sure to cover the president and the country in a biased, one-sided fashion, even when their own polls show that Trump’s initiatives have garnered the support of from 68 to 80 percent of American voters. 

Including a big chunk of their readers. 

At that point, I pulled the plug on my Washington Post subscription, and -– for good measure –- pulled the plug on my electronic subscriptions to the New York Times and the LA Times, too. 

They have nothing to say to me that I haven’t heard again and again (and again).  There’s a limit to how much of this evolving bait-and-switch even a trained journalist can take.

Ned Barnett is, in addition to being a trained journalist who’s worked for newspapers and magazines, radio talk shows and TV news broadcasts dating back to 1972, is the author of 40 published books, with three more books set to be published later this year.  These include two ghostwritten books, including a “campaign biography” for a candidate for governor in the Midwest.  Later this year, one of his other books will be “How To Win An Election Campaign,” that focuses on strategies and tactics that have worked for me – and for campaigns that I’ve followed – including state-level Presidential campaigns, as well as Federal Senate and House elections, Gubernatorial elections and state-and-local campaigns.  He can be reached at 702-561-1167 or nedbarnett51@gmail.com.

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