A Post Mortem

There are very few stories I am competent to write, because I don’t know anything about anything, but when I pretend to be competent, I mostly I fake it. Yet there is one subject about which I can speak with some authority, and that is about newspapers.

I know enough to know that “newspapers” is an antiquated term but The Washington Post is in deep-shit trouble, and I don’t say that with malice. I love the Washington Post, but holy hell.

Here’s the thing: A newspaper has one thing going for it. Its credibility. That’s it; when that is gone, nothing is left. It doesn’t matter how much money it is making. It can be hemorrhaging money, losing it by the the barrel-full of ink. It can be practically minting money, like newspapers used to do, back in the Day. Its value is that people believe it. That is its only value. We get the bad guys. There are people working for the Wapo accounting department who feel a part of this. It’s the Game, and we are all a part of it. We get the bad guys, as a team. There is a beauty in this. We feel good about ourselves. We cannot be the bad guys.

The Washington Post is now, officially, a piece of crap, owned by a billionaire, run by British millionaires, people without any integrity. It is obvious. This is not an impossible situation to rectify. But Jeffrey Bezos has to do it. He did it once before.

Do you remember when he did? Probably not. It seems incredibly long ago. A story broke that his billion-dollar marriage had dissolved due to an affair. Embarrassing. Tawdry, I guess. Probably. Affairs tend to be tawdry, or too easily described as tawdry. They are tawdry by nature. Bezos chose an unusual way to disclose it: I can say this from the inside: He earned the respect of the Washington Post staff by NOT revealing it in some stupid, self-serving piece he wrote in The Post, where he could have had total control of it. He had that power, but he didn’t exercise it. He wrote it in some crappy online venue; he felt he was being blackmailed by The National Enquirer’s editor — the aptly named David Pecker; so he jumped the gun on them. He did not savage his ex-wife or even come close to that. He wrote it on a trashy blog called Medium.com. He did not destroy The Post. He could have, but he did not.

Hey. Jeff.

You cannot have a publisher who offers an exclusive interview with a radio reporter in exchange for a guarantee that he will not report a story about his exposing his journalistic criminality. You cannot do it. You cannot ever pay a person hundreds of thousand dollars for a story, however good it is, because you know what? You are not a whore. You cannot have a guy like this, the one who finds no problem with this, run your paper. You know why? Because no one will work for him. And I know that from the inside.

So. Jeff? You know what you didn’t do last time? Don’t do it again. You have more money than anyone else on Earth. You don’t need these guys. I’d be happy to run The Post for $250,000, which is a lot less than you are presumably planning to pay them. And I am not a complete shithead. And by the way, you can get better than me, for less money. Go for it.

There is a lady name Sally Buzbee who has proven she can run a newspaper, and who has the required judgment and confidence and honesty. She proved that a few days ago, when everything was on the line, most importantly, the newspaper’s reputation. Give her a close look.

That’s it.

—

One more item of business. As many of you know, I am the world’s premier curator of the Aptonym, a term referring to people whose names — and jobs — coalesce in unintentional brilliance. “Jeffrey Undercoffer” was an undercover officer for the Secret Service. There was a firefighter named “Les McBurney.”

Well, there is a new one who I just discovered, and I cannot tell you about it. I cannot tell you because four of the most brilliant judges of humor I know — Pat Myers, Dave Barry, Tom Shroder and Rachel Manteuffel— have instructed me that I may not. Any three of these people would have been enough to kill it, but all four were definitive, and horrified, and final. So that is that. It cannot be said aloud, and that is that.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Pool.