Three Million Reasons to Facepalm

—

So.

The image above was given to us by Deb Milbrath, a freelance cartoonist in Atlanta. I love it.

Here’s something I don’t love:

I just was shown a government document listing the 2025 salaries of Washington Post employees who were immigrants temporarily admitted to the United States under H1B visas. Their skills are considered “special.” It lists their base yearly incomes, before bonuses, overtime, golden parachutes, or what have you.

I scanned the list. The base salaries ranged from $60,000 for a designer to $223,000 for a vice president.

Then I hit the outlier. It was $ 3 million. It went to a “CEO.” There was only one of those in 2025, this guy:

That would be Will Lewis, the man whose two years of incompetent stewardship, editorial cowardice and less than ethical conduct brought The Washington Post to where it is today, a dreadfully diminished, professionally humiliated institution, drained overnight of nearly a third of its staff.

Three million dollars could have paid roughly 27 of the 300 reporters, photographers and editors who were sacked by Lewis before he took his own professional life and resigned under pressure. His resignation came in a particularly shabby fashion, after he was caught on camera hobnobbing with the swells at a red-carpet pre-Super Bowl event just hours after cold-bloodedly annihilating his entire sports department.

When he axed them, Lewis didn’t have the guts to face his employees. That job he designated to his executive editor. As the time of the Zoom meeting approached, Lewis ghosted his entire staff in a spectacular burst of shame and/or fear. He shambled away to a different office. He didn’t even answer the phone.

Who could have predicted such a graceless fall from grace? Surely no one would expect that of the man who was Rupert Murdoch’s toady, credibly accused of having directed the coverup of the phone hacking scandal that brought down The News of The World, in London.

But Jeff Bezos gave this guy $3 million a year, plus whatever sweet separation clause he might have. If you add the the $75 million Bezos flushed away to finance the “Melania” movie in order to suck Donald Trump’s ample posterior — why, you wouldn’t have had to fire anyone and destroy the newspaper, at all!

Facepalm, right?

—

Hey, here’s another great cartoon. It appeared in Le Monde, by the the artist Guffo,

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Good, then.

We’re working hard here, in the ramshackle Gene Pool treehouse. If you can afford it, might you consider becoming a paying subscriber?