The Washington Post Makes It Easier For Powerful People And Companies To Undermine Its Reporting

You might recall that about half a decade ago news outlets began to whine endlessly about the poor old news comment section. Editors at many outlets didn’t like the way the comment section was used to prominently point out errors in stories and challenge newsrooms.

They were also often too cheap to invest in moderating them, resulting in shitty comment sections they blamed on the nature of comment sections, not on their own cheap incompetence. Basically a lot of outlets outsourced all community interaction to the homogenized, badly managed, major social-media giants like Facebook, which degraded both on-site community and discourse quality.

To its credit, the Washington Post has kept and improved its comment section during that period, even though it’s increasingly made less prominent and viewable. They’re now engaging in a revamp of paper interaction that’s likely not going to serve actual readers, and is likely to only degrade the website’s own reporting — allowing powerful people to distort allegations against them.

According to a breakdown by the New York Times, The Post will soon let prominent people or companies comment on reporting within the confines of the article itself:

“The program will allow only people identified by name in an article to comment on it, and the articles included for now are only those published by The Post’s climate team, according to the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The Post will vet their remarks for accuracy and fairness, and the publication said it also might withhold comments that violated rules against defamatory or obscene submissions. The submissions will appear as annotations, revealed to readers if they click or hover a cursor over the source’s name in the article.”

They’re curiously choosing to trial this effort first on climate change reporting, an arena where billionaires and companies have long attempted to distort science and fact to their own financial benefit.

Reporters will be able to respond, creating an additional layer of conversation within each story. The ultimate aim, the Post claims, is to bring a lot of Post readers back from the major social media networks that news organizations ceded control to a decade earlier, which is foundationally the right idea:

“The ultimate aim is to keep readers on the site — instead of having them shift to social media platforms like X and Facebook to have a conversation about a story.

Matt Murray, the executive editor of The Post, said in the memo outlining the program that its aim was to “continue and deepen the conversation about our journalism on our own platforms, rather than losing those interactions to social media, where sources sometimes turn.”

Again, if managed properly, this might not be the worst idea, giving journalism subjects the ability to expand the conversation. Journalism should be a healthy, curated conversation.

But given the overall direction of the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos of late, and unrelenting fire of modern propaganda, it shouldn’t be hard to see how this could quickly go badly for real journalism. Companies could be allowed to endlessly “correct the misperception” of critics, and powerful people will be able to distort, deny, or distract from allegations based on substantive reporting.

That would make it harder for journalists to do their job, and undermine, not deepen, existing work, Kelly McBride, senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, told the New York Times:

“Most of the sources who talk to The Washington Post are very powerful people who are trying to use their power to shape the country in a way that they see fit,” she said. “And they are masters of manipulation when it comes to messaging and communication.” “The Post will have to devote a significant amount of resources to the fact-checking end of this to make it work,” Ms. McBride said.

It smells like a major concession to power by the kind of folks who have been signaling they’re intent on pandering to center-right (or far right) corporatist ideology. The kind of folks who refuse to run cartoons about powerful, rich tech titans. The kind of folks who refuse to publish editorials that challenge corporate power. The kind of folks who kill stories critical of the paper’s recent mismanagement.

Washington Post readership is plummeting as a result of these sorts of decisions, and it’s hard to believe that letting a billionaire CEO or a giant company deride your own journalists’ work within the confines of your reporting is the sort of thing that will bring the paper back from the brink. If done wrong with an eye on coddling power, it could easily accelerate things in the opposite direction.