The Washington Post



The Washington Post, depending on who you ask, is either commie trash, a neoconservative rag desperately trying to outflank the rival (and paleoconservative) Washington Times from the right, the epitome of the worst excesses of the liberal media, Jeff Bezos's mouthpiece with its weird fact checks and billionaire apologia, or America's Newspaper of Record.TM Media Bias/Fact Check, a more neutral source, classifies The Washington Post as a left-center source, slightly on the left of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, for instance. Since February 2017, a month after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the Post's new slogan is "Democracy Dies in Darkness" (although they claim it has nothing to do with Trump as much as it is for their paywalls ).

It is most famous for the role played by two of its reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (made famous in the film All the President's Men), in slowly exposing the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon's resignation. At the time, the Post was but one of three competing Washington, D.C. daily newspapers along with the Washington Star and the Washington Daily News. Their coverage of the Watergate scandal solidified the Post's dominance in the D.C. newspaper market and gained the paper national stature. They were bought by Jeff Bezos, the asshole founder of Amazon, in 2013. Consequently, they also can't afford you looking at the newspaper for free so they helpfully imposed an article limit before hitting the ever-obnoxious paywall as well as bitching about your adblocker and proclaiming they will use your cookies. But, hey, at least the 2020 COVID-19 coverage is free!

Subsidiaries
From 1961 to 2010 the Post published Newsweek, America's second-largest weekly newsmagazine. Newsweek then collapsed after WaPo sold it off (admittedly, it was going downhill before then).

In 2004 the Post purchased Slate Magazine from Microsoft.

In 1984, the Post's parent company purchased Kaplan, Inc., a tutoring and educational testing service. In 2000, the Post bought an online college and renamed it Kaplan College (now Kaplan University). Like most for-profit institutions of higher education, Kaplan U. has become known more for its quest for profit than for its quest for knowledge.

Columnists
An incomplete list; some notable Post opinion columnists include:

Liberal columnists

 * E.J. Dionne, Jr.
 * David Ignatius
 * Ruth Marcus
 * Dana Milbank (author of Tears of a Clown, an anti-Glenn Beck book)
 * Steven Pearlstein (business columnist)
 * Eugene Robinson
 * Tom Toles — political cartoonist
 * Katrina vanden Heuvel
 * Paul Waldman

Conservative columnists
Since 2016, you could be forgiven for thinking that at least some of these columnists are actually liberal because of their relentless attacks on the criminality and corruption of the Trump administration.
 * Megan McArdle
 * Michael Gerson
 * Hugh Hewitt
 * Max Boot
 * Anne Applebaum (a centrist on domestic issues, but a hawkish neoconservative on anything to do with foreign policy and Eastern Europe).
 * Stanley Kurtz
 * Charles Krauthammer
 * Kathleen Parker (sometimes, she has criticized Sarah Palin)
 * Jennifer Rubin (online only)
 * Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman, now an MSNBC talking head.
 * Marc Thiessen (former George W. Bush speechwriter)
 * George Will (a weekly panelist on ABC's This Week Sunday morning talk show)