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NOTE: “Corruptio optimi pessima” = Corruption of the best is the worst of all.

I can’t remember when I started reading the Washington Post. I was following it through the Watergate years, but was a mostly broke rookie trying to find my footing as a writer to afford a subscription. By the early ‘80s, though, when I lived inside the Beltway, it was slapped down outside my front door every morning. After detours in Pennsylvania and then a move into North Carolina, I became a regular again. I was not an early adopter of the digital edition, but soon got used to it.

When Bezos killed the Harris endorsement, I didn’t like it, but mostly shrugged. After forty years as a working writer, I knew that endorsements rarely move the needle and  understood the Golden Rule of Journalism (& the rest of corporate America): Them With the Gold Make (& Break) the Rules. I was more upset by watching the once-titanic paper shrink and shrivel with the wasting disease of internet competition.

But now we’ve turned the page into the wilderness of Project 2025, and anyone can see its progress, like a rapidly-metastasizing tumor. The Post’s bending of the knee is tragically just about on schedule.

There are other news sources, mainly in the half-underground of Substack. But the loss of the Post is gall and wormwood, a bitter pill.

And not the last one.