Splitting the Adam

The Wapo Opinions editor just fades away...

Adam O’Neal

Hello. A short Gene Pool today, in which we revisit that feisty alternative news site,

. . . Which, just for today, gets a brand new logo:

Yesterday, the Washington Post matter-of-factly announced that Adam O’Neal, the callow 34-year-old editor of The Post’s Opinions section, was stepping down after a year of libertarianizing the shit out it.

The story in The Post didn’t put it quite that way, of course. In fact, it wasn’t very helpful at all in explaining why this happened. It hinted at nothing negative, and gave no reason for Mr. O’Neal’s departure, which it said was his choice, and which appears to have been suspiciously sudden — blindsiding and gobsmacking his staff.

Just four days earlier, O’Neal gave a forward-looking interview to Fox News in which he bragged about how well his section was doing, and how its move rightward (he called it “balanced”) was embraced by grateful readers, and so forth. He even praised the wisdom of Jeffrey Bezos’s decision to limit the section’s opinions to two libertarian “pillars” — free markets, and personal liberties. In response, O’Neal had hired a bunch of young, painfully earnest small-government, laissez-faire columnists.

So.

What do I think of this?

I’m not going to tell you! Instead, I will let The Post tell you itself, kicking and screaming, via their own summary of reader Comments, as compiled by their own AI bot, which publishes automatically, free of human control or, um, censorship or strategic reticence:

The comments express strong dissatisfaction with the changes in The Washington Post's Opinion section under Adam O'Neal, criticizing it for becoming overly right-leaning and losing its previous credibility and quality. Many commenters express relief at O'Neal's departure, hoping for a return to a more balanced and respected editorial stance. There is also significant criticism of Jeff Bezos' influence on the paper, with some readers indicating they plan to cancel their subscriptions due to these changes.

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There is an interesting postscript to this Postslip.

The extremely short and skimpy story in The Post about this also did not mention something that may or may not have been germane to O’Neal’s sudden departure. On the selfsame day, the newspaper had to correct an egregiously stupid editorial claiming that raising the maximum tax rate on the wealthy had lost Scotland a staggering 15 to 30 billion pounds in tax revenue.

That number turned out to have been off by 100,000 percent, the writers having mistaken “million” for “billion.” Thirty billion happens to be higher than the total amount of taxes Scotland levies in a year. My assumption is that this mistake was occasioned by naive wishful thinking among the Bezos-saluting editorialists: Libertarians hate taxes.

Interestingly, the Post did not explain the magnitude of the error or how it could have happened. It merely changed the numbers in the story and said, at the bottom:

“Correction: An earlier version of this editorial misstated the estimated range of revenue lost by raising the top tax rate.”

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Since this is the Weekend Gene Pool, please write in and tell us about the biggest bonehead mistake you’ve ever made. Send your boneheads here:

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Good, that’s it, except for the usual drill.