I love the Washington Post's new mission statement and so should you

Through the Trump and post-Trump era, The Washington Post adopted a top-of-page slogan that appeared to squarely acknowledge the dangers of what at first seemed a descent into Idiocracy-style madness but soon solidified into the same overtly autocratic and fascist movement that has spread to so many other countries:

Democracy Dies in Darkness.

That pithy bit of grim poetry will likely remain at the top of the Post's pages, but inside the company the executive team has unveiled a new mission statement that dispenses with such bold stances. After the paper's billionaire owner spiked the paper's endorsement of a scandal-free Democratic presidential nominee over a Republican convicted felon responsible for a violent coup attempt targeting lawmakers in the U.S. Capitol, and after the revelation of that thumb-on-the-scales led to a reported 300,000 subscription cancellations, a cascade of high-profile staff resignations, a new massive revenue hole, another round of layoffs, and a letter from 400 Post employees to Jeff Bezos asking politely for him to remove his head from his lower intestine and consider how to repair the damage, widely despised Post CEO Will Lewis and his team announced the new mission statement that will patch things up and lead the Post into a new age of Whateveritism:

Riveting Storytelling for All of America.

I love it. It's perfect. No notes. Let's put it in the big font so that we can admire it more admiringly.

The Washington Post:
Riveting Storytelling for All of America

Aaah. Now that's the stuff.

At first glance, you might think this a peculiar mission statement for a daily newspaper that still brags of its past scoops and relentlessly touts its own indispensability when it comes to informing Americans and exposing crimes by the powerful. You are wrong; it is perfect.

Does the new mission statement emphasize journalism's commitment to exposing Truth? No. It instead promises to bring you Storytelling.

Is the paper confirming its journalistic commitment to being Informative? No! The metric by which executives will measure success is whether the stories they are brought are Riveting.

Whether or not you agree with the direction Will Lewis and the Trump-empocketed Jeff Bezos are steering the paper, there's never been a terser but more complete declaration of goals.

We do not speak truth to power; we do not uncover scandals by those put in positions of public trust, we do not have anything there about Facts or Accuracy or Democracy or Information. All of it is sidelined to bring you an almost violently generic mission statement scraped off any one of hundreds of television and movie pitches.

Riveting Storytelling is the premise of Duck Dynasty, Ice Road Truckers, and The Deadliest Catch. Riveting storytelling is the oeuvre of The Hallmark Channel and their now-infinite collection of movies about finding true love on a small-town Christmas tree lot or in a gardening shop. Riveting storytelling is what Disney aims for, and is the reason that [secondary character] had to die in [franchise you like].

The Washington Post's new mission statement makes no pretense of journalistic excellence or fact-finding or civic duty. It only declares that they're going to do some telling of stories, and if journalists come in with stories about lead pipes in schools or new federal immigration sweeps that are scaring workers off from California harvests, well maybe those stories will get published or maybe they won't. It depends on whether you can make lead poisoning riveting enough.

It's a perfect mission statement because it was clearly the brainchild of either company outsiders or the do-nothing executive vision-havers who hire them and hang on their every word. No journalist or editor would come up with "Riveting" as the major goal of their daily paper; nobody expects or wants families to be worked into a froth as they pore over a "riveting" newspaper while their uneaten breakfasts congeal. Riveting Storytelling is, again, the most generic "media company" statement that could ever be conceived—and it embraces, more than any other two words, what the people who run CNN, and Fox News, and Newsmax, and every central European-run hoax news site all agree is the primary goal of all Content: Be Riveting.

Screw accuracy—people don't want it. Screw informative—nobody watches the news or reads a newspaper to be informed. It's riveting that glues eyeballs to pages, making sure not a single scrap of the consumer's vision isn't riddled with something meant to shock them, or enrage them, or make them jealous.

It's the Generic Content Blob theory that hedge funds brought to tech and media companies they captured and which has now taken over every square inch of your "Content." Here, take a look:

That would be a single Apple Intelligence notification keeping you abreast of what The Washington Post is reporting on, at just one point of one day. "Pete Hegseth fired; Trump tariffs impact inflation; Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio confirmed."

Is it riveting? You bet it is! Not a damn one of those things happened, they're all hallucinatory garbage disgorged from Apple's own version of the A.I. Generic Content Blob, and every single verb in there is an outright lie.

But as a "story" to be told, it's riveting. It's better than the real news of the day was. The actual news was that nothing unexpected happened other than that Republican senators all scrambled to grease the bottoms of their shoes so that they could slide into their own powerless irrelevance with a bit more momentum than we previously thought possible.

So why not drop the act, and just publish the more "riveting" versions of the stories? That seems to be where Bezos and Lewis want to go, and it brings us to the second half of the Generic Media Mission Statement 2025. As Post competitor The New York Times reports:

Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has made comments in line with the new mission statement in conversations with Post journalists in recent years, according to two people familiar with those discussions. Mr. Bezos has expressed hopes that The Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding The Post’s audience among conservatives, the people said.

The Post has already begun to consider ways to sharply increase the amount of opinion commentary published on its website, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. An adviser to The Post, Lippe Oosterhof, has conducted brainstorming sessions about a new initiative that would make it easier to receive and publish opinion writing from outside contributors.

The Post has also tried to draw a sharper distinction between its news and opinion content.

Ha ha ha oh lord. Well, won't that be something to see.

One of the hedge fund and cable television fixations, when it comes to producing Generic Content Blobs that will embiggen their company's Eyeball Retention Metrics, is the production of reality-based content. Scripted content is very expensive. Journalism is very expensive. All of those unpleasantly clever people have unions, which makes it all ten times worse.

But ostensibly unscripted, reality-show content in which you get a bunch of people together, lock some cameras on them and then have some poor schmuck edit the resulting hundreds of hours of video into something vaguely riveting? That's dirt-cheap, in comparison, and always will be.

In the news industry, reality television is called "panel discussions." Whenever you see talking head A asking talking heads B and C to weigh in on Generic News Event, that's the reality show version of news. What's happening in the world is an afterthought; what's really important is what these particular three clowns plucked from an excruciatingly narrow demographic and paid to emphasize very specific points of view think about what's happening in the world.

"This event proves that So-and-So is the one who's really in touch with the American people," one of them will inevitably say, and the others either all nod like chucklefucks or act indignant and say that the opposite is true. Boom, you've got your fifteen minutes of riveting content and nobody had to interview a poor person.

When the Post's executive teams it wants to boost opinion writing from "outside contributors," that's what it means: They want some cheap Content Blob content, and they specifically want some Content Blob content that might appeal to "blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities," more specifically "conservatives," and if the news cycle is full of hard-banging corruption from a cast of far-right extremists putting people in internment camps or justifying the Fking Military Invasion of Greenland then the only way to appeal to those conservatives is to give them the Content Blob bullshit versions of those events they want rather than the hardnose reality-based versions that describe how it's all going to hell.

Ta-da! "Outside contributors" to the rescue. Matt Gaetz, you know a lot about the dangers unaccompanied children face in today's scary drug-and-predator-filled world, maybe you could whip us up something about how the imprisonment and deportation of American citizen children with their immigrant parents is Good, Actually.

Unfortunately, what Jeff Bezos doesn't know, largely because he is a billionaire and billionaires tend to fire anyone who brings them bad news with ruthless efficiency, is that his plan of trying to make conservatives read more newspapers has been tried by many, many, many smarter people than him for a long time and it doesn't work. No company has ever found a way to make large collections of conservatives read; even during the book-burning bans that swept the nation in the last few years, the number of conservatives who bothered to read the books they wanted to ban didn't amount to even 1%.

If all conservative Cleveland firefighters wanted from their news was "conservative," then The New York Post would be in their lunchrooms right now. It's not. Outside of New York, nobody gives a shit about The New York Post.

The British tabloids have historically appealed to conservative readers by putting big pictures of mostly-nude women inside. Can we expect The Washington Post to retool their paper similarly?

It'd count as riveting, right? Though not storytelling, unless you also brought back the listings of personal measurements and a sentence or two about which desserts the subject most likes.

So we've got a perfect mission statement, one plucked to represent the rigorously enforced empty-headed "just give me content" blobbery of modern media operations, in service to an attempt to broadening the newspaper's appeal to conservatives by tamping down on the Facts pages and bumping up the What Matt Gaetz Thinks pages, an effort which has never succeeded and which will further convince remaining Washington Post readers that the paper really does intend to brush off the radicalization of one of the two major American political parties into a coup-backing, corruption-embracing, hate-promoting authoritarian goon squad by instead more fully embracing the he said, she said crooked pundit hackery that brought us here. That's what they're betting on.

But surely the top brass at the nation's once-foremost newspaper can't really be so uniformly inept and bungling as to further risk the paper's very existence, right? It can't be that bad?

The slide deck that Ms. Watford presented describes artificial intelligence as a key enabler of The Post’s success, the people said. It describes The Post as “an A.I.-fueled platform for news” that delivers “vital news, ideas and insights for all Americans where, how and when they want it.”

Oh yeah, they're dead. Sell the desks and strip the copper wiring, this thing is going down hard.