A Note to Readers

Gene Hackman has just died and I’ve been tasked to write an appreciation for the Washington Post, which means I’m on deadline for a newspaper for which I have no remaining respect. The question remains: Why am I doing it?

I was asked this several times yesterday by Watch List subscribers, by friends and by one daughter in the wake of the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, announcing that, going forward, the Post op-ed page would only publish pieces in favor of “personal liberties” and the “free market.” And it deserves an answer.

Or answers. One of which, to be bluntly honest, is that I’m still in the position where I rely on the money I’m paid by the Post. But money, of course, has a price beyond its face value, in complicity and morality and self-worth. So what am I still doing there?

I’m not on staff at the WaPo. I’m a freelancer officially filling in as chief film critic while the paper’s staff critic, Ann Hornaday, is away for a year writing a book about (oh, the irony) “All The President’s Men.” Ann is due to be back on April 1, and although details are fuzzy, it’s expected that I’ll continue to review movies for the paper in some capacity. If I choose to.

Complicating the issue is my admiration for all the reporters and editors at the Post who don’t have collapsible spines, including and especially the editor to whom I directly deal with, a woman who was my boss for many years at the Boston Globe and who is a valued colleague and close friend. She’s dealing with her own response to Bezos’ decision to turn the paper into an oligarch’s megaphone, as are her peers, but there’s a loyalty there to her that’s been baked in over several decades. (That said, if she goes, I go.)

In addition, I love what I do, and I’ve been blessed with the opportunity and space to do it, at Entertainment Weekly in the 1990s, for 19 years at the Globe and now in this newsletter and at the Washington Post. But almost every writer and editor I know loves what they do, in part because they know the institutions they write for have, in theory, always had their backs. No longer.

So everyone is examining their moral balance sheets and deciding what to do about it. Easy to say the entire staff should quit when you don’t know the personal lives and responsibilities of each person on that staff. While I’m cheered in part to see the Post hemorrhaging subscribers in the wake of Bezos’ announcement, I’m also depressed to see readers abandoning a ship that needs them in order to continue the good work the reporters still do.

The writer Virginia Heffernan is in the same boat as I am, with a book review due this week and a queasy feeling about filing it. Her latest posting at her Substack newsletter (I left that platform a year ago and still feel fine about the decision but don’t begrudge anyone who has remained) chews over the issues with better phrasing and just as much uncertainty as anything I’m writing here. She quotes a passage from James Joyce’s “The Dead” in which Gabriel Conroy is grilled about his continuing to write a literary column for a newspaper with anti-Irish “unionist” politics. He doesn’t have an easy answer, and neither does Virgina. And neither do I.

 Margaret Sullivan, formerly a public editor at The New York Times and a media critic at The Washington Post, had her own thoughts at her Substack newsletter and in the Guardian; both pieces are well worth reading. She quotes Martin Baron, the former managing editor of the Post (and the Boston Globe), who is considered by many and by me as one of the most honorable people in the entirety of the American news media, and if you want to amend that to one of the few honorable people, or the only honorable person, that’s fine by me.

Baron’s comments read in part, “Bezos himself has done personal liberties a disservice by cravenly yielding to a president who shows no respect for liberty — one who aims to use the power of government to bully, threaten, punish and crush anyone who is not in his camp, especially the press. There is no doubt in my mind that he is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests, Amazon (the source of his wealth) and Blue Origin (which represents his lifelong passion for space exploration). He has prioritized those commercial interests over The Post, and he is betraying The Post’s longstanding principles to do so.”

(An aside: The most interesting analyses of seen of Bezos’ announcement call attention to his statement that he’s “of America and for America.” You know who’s not “of America”? Elon Musk. Could Bezos be positioning himself as the next oligarch-in-charge when/if Musk implodes? Stay tuned.)

Sullivan further quotes Baron as praising the work that the Post’s reporters and editors continue to do, and he’s right to do so. But some are questioning his earlier support of Bezos, prior to his retirement and in his 2023 book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, as a sign of his own complicity or naivete.

I know Marty personally but not well, and I would argue that he’s the last person to be complicit in the watering down of journalism’s fundamental mission to report and reflect the truth. Naivete? Only if a person who holds himself to the highest standards of ethical behavior in his profession expects – maybe even assumes – that others will behave the same.

Well, maybe we’ve all been naive, all these decades. If the time for that is past – and it is – someone still has to uphold the basic timbers of a free press in a democracy, and Marty Baron’s retired. So I guess it’s up to us.

I’ll continue to write film reviews for The Washington Post for the foreseeable future. That may change. I discontinued my Amazon Prime membership some time ago; I urge readers to do the same. I will no longer be recommending films on Amazon or Prime Video going forward. Most of them are available on AppleTV and elsewhere, anyway.

I invite your comments, which are open to all today.

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