WaPo CEO Makes Stunning Admission: ‘People Are Seeing Through Our Propaganda’

Vanity Fair:

When Washington Post publisher Will Lewis and new interim executive editor Matt Murray met with staff Monday, the newsroom was still coming to terms with the abrupt exit of Sally Buzbee, who had led the paper since May 2021.

“Everyone was pretty shocked with your email last night,” one reporter said at the meeting, according to a source present. The reporter suggested that “the most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post, and we now have four white men running three newsrooms,” and expressed surprise at this development given Lewis’s prior commitments to diversity.

Things went from bad to worse at the “Monday meeting” as the new boss tried to lay down the law while not offending the false god of “diversity.”

Vanity Fair:

During the Monday meeting, Lewis said, “We need world-class journalism every single day, and the people that are coming in to help us do that will be a real benefit to the organization.” He said he “really enjoyed working with Sally” and “wish[ed] it could have gone on for longer, but it couldn’t.” As far as diversity goes, Lewis admitted “it’s not great” and vowed to do better going forward.

Later in the meeting, another reporter asked Lewis whether “any women or people of color were interviewed and seriously considered for either of these positions,” a question that prompted applause. Lewis said there will be “significant opportunities” within the new organizational structure. Asked by another staffer about which people he met with, Lewis said, “It was an iterative, messy process, which I don’t want to go into the details of.”

At one point Lewis was asked whether he was intentionally bringing in people who come from a different culture than the Post. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” Lewis said. “So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

He continued to take a blunt approach when asked about the “third newsroom,” specifically how it would be staffed. “I’ll be looking for people to put their hands up internally, but also sourcing talent externally,” said Lewis. (Of the “third newsroom,” Lewis said in Sunday’s memo, “The aim is to give the millions of Americans—who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed—compelling, exciting and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.”)

But what about the Social Justice Warriors ensconced throughout the crooked Post, you may ask? There’s an answer for that:

“Don’t we need our brilliant social journalists and service journalists as embedded in our core product to make sure that people are actually reading the thing that’s out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post?” one staffer asked, to which Lewis replied, “You haven’t done it. I’ve listened to the platitudes. Honestly, it’s just not happening.”

Brits are apparently now doing the jobs woke Americans can’t do…

Murray, who previously led The Wall Street Journal, will replace Buzbee as executive editor through the presidential election, at which point, Robert Winnett, a veteran of the UK’s Telegraph Media Group, will take on the new role of editor. Murray will move over to a new division of the paper that Lewis referred to as its “third newsroom”—Opinions being the second—which will focus on “service and social media journalism” and run separately from the core news operation.

[…]

Lewis also worked with Winnett at the UK’s The Sunday Times and, in 2007, hired him at The Daily Telegraph, the right-leaning British paper that Lewis, himself, was recently looking to purchase along with investors. Winnett, Lewis wrote Sunday, will oversee “our core coverage areas, including politics, investigations, business, technology, sports and features.” By the end of the year, the Post will become one more newsroom—along with The Wall Street Journal,CNN, and Bloomberg News—run by a British news executive.

The wokies can’t stand that…

“The fact that Will Lewis keeps going to his network rather than plucking Washington Post leadership implies that he finds everyone lacking, and I think that’s kind of the most disturbing thing,” a second staffer told me.

Maybe these activists could drop the progressive politics and just report the news like actual professionals for a change? What a novel idea, right? Something tells us the American people would probably appreciate that. As it stands now, the Washington Post is nothing more than a North Korea-style regime-operated propaganda machine.