Puck: Inside the Woke Coup at the Washington Post

Oh, I forgot: Welcome to Tuesday. The word "Tuesday" derives from "Tiw's Day."

Old English Tīwesdæg 'day of Tīw', a Germanic god of war and the sky; translation of Latin dies Marti 'day of Mars', the god Tīw being equated with the Roman god Mars. Compare with Swedish tisdag.

A key difference between Mars and Tiw is that Mars was the god of garlic knots and Tiw the god of cheesy bread. Their eternal feud lives on in the struggle between Domino's and Papa John's.

By the way, the bundling of two letters together as in "æ" is called a ligature, because the two letters are tied to each other by a, yes, ligature. As an illegal alien may use, for example, to strangle an American 12-year-old girl to death.

Dylan Byers confirms: ousted incompetent woke Executive Editor Sally Buzbee started up the "investigation" into her successor.

The hit piece attempted to link the would-be incoming executive editor with the British phone-hacking scandal. Dylan Byers reminds everyone that this was one of the most heavily-investigated scandals in British journalism history, and Winnett was never named as one the guilty parties.

Nevertheless, the "Posties" smeared him as responsible for it. They even -- and this is amazing -- refused to publish his answers to their questions, claiming that he never responded.

He did. They just didn't publish those responses.

You can imagine the reasons why.

The Post newsroom had been on edge for days over the shake-up, and a new, somewhat nebulous plan to build a "third newsroom" of soft content to grow the Post's audience. Lewis had amplified those anxieties by delivering hard, unvarnished truths about a business that had lost $77 million the previous year: "Your audience has halved in recent years," he told his journalists. "People are not reading your stuff. I can't sugarcoat it anymore."

...

By that point, Buzbee had also told colleagues about the infamous meetings where, in her telling, Lewis had tried to dissuade her from publishing stories that included accusations about his involvement in a British phone-hacking scandal--a tale that the carrier pigeon would lay on the doorstep of the Times, metastasizing the crisis. (Lewis has denied pressuring Buzbee, and denied any wrongdoing in the hacking affair.) Buzbee's smoke bomb expertly preyed upon all the Post newsroom's most delicate triggers--latent concerns about Lewis's journalistic ethics and his refusal to address questions about the hacking scandal to their satisfaction--and some journalists began to wonder whether the contretemps may have played a role in her resignation.

Within days of Buzbee's ouster, some Post journalists decided to take matters into their own hands. During a meeting of the foreign desk early that week, led by Post international editor Doug Jehl and his deputy Jennifer Amur, journalists discussed a plan to investigate both Lewis and Winnett to see if they could unearth unflattering information about the two men's history in the U.K., where they once worked together as journalists at the Sunday Times and The Telegraph. At least one staffer present at the meeting later brought the issue to Lewis's attention, said it was a shameful reflection on the Post's own ethics--a hit job masquerading as journalism--and encouraged him to take action. Lewis instead referred the matter to human resources.

Gotta tell ya, shameless hit jobs written to advance one's own private interests are what "journalism" is now.

Ya Boi Zach (who has now gone insane and is attacking people for fighting wokeness) had a pithy quote about "journalism" -- every article a "journalist" writes is either a hit piece or a puff piece, and they have already made the decision which it will be before they ask a single question. There is no such thing as neutrally-reported factual stories any longer; they're all propaganda pieces designed to hurt some person or group and advance the interests of another person or group.

It's just all political "war room" propaganda now.

The Post journalists' attempt to investigate their own boss and future editor is their right and privilege--that's how this business works, even if their work had an emotional agenda. The news media loves to cloak itself in a patina of strenuous nonpartisanship, but it is still the product of human beings. The journalists may have also been motivated by another friction between Lewis and Buzbee. On multiple occasions since becoming publisher and C.E.O., Lewis had expressed concerns over the tone of the paper's coverage of the Israel-Hamas War, which he and others inside the paper viewed as having an anti-Israel bias. Lewis had also questioned Buzbee's apparent reluctance to investigate the financing behind the pro-Palestinian protests on American college campuses, which Politico had reported were backed by major Democratic donors. At one point, Buzbee also revealed that her daughter was participating in the protests on her college campus.

Of course.

...

In the days that followed, [Matt Murray, who Buzbee hired to oversee the paper between her ouster and Winnett's arrival] asked former Post managing editor Cameron Barr, now working with the Post on a freelance basis, to oversee its investigations into both Lewis and Winnett. Barr, who had stepped down after being passed over for the executive editor role that went to Buzbee, would now lead a six-person team from his new home in Skipton, on the outskirts of Leeds in the north of England.

Buzbee, who lost her job to Winnett, set off this "smoke bomb." And then, to "investigate" Winnett, they assigned a guy who himself had been passed over for the position.

Everyone directing this has a specific monetary and professional interest in the outcome of the "investigation."

There is no thought whatsoever to giving this "investigation" to a disinterested, not-personally-invested person.

And: Mike Murray, the once-passed-over would-be executive editor, is now being considered for the executive editor job now that he successfully cut the hamstrings of the guy who had been given the job.

It's like "Mirror, Mirror" -- the evil "Posties" only advance through assassination.

...
The first major piece by Barr's team was published last Sunday, on Father's Day. Less than 24 hours earlier, the Times had reported that Lewis and Winnett may have used illegally obtained phone records for articles in the Sunday Times two decades ago. The Post's piece, however, focused squarely on Winnett, their incoming executive editor...

Post reporters first reached out to Winnett on Sunday evening to ask him for comment on the story, just a few hours before it was published. Winnett furnished responses to their inquiries to the Post's P.R. team, which were not included in the Post's report. Instead, a jarring and startling line in the story stated: "Winnett, currently a deputy editor of The Telegraph, did not respond to a detailed list of questions." Post comms chief Kathy Baird declined to comment on the matter.

Was the Post P.R. team gravely incompetent? Were they instead quietly manipulating the situation to side with their newsroom, which was by now nakedly trying to nuke not only Winnett but also Lewis--not only by assigning a team of six to a story with zero national import, but also by leaking their inner turmoil to Politico and the Times in an ostensible attempt to ethics-shame Jeff Bezos off his $500 million superyacht in the Mediterranean?

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Indeed, it's hard to look back on the recent tumult at the Post and not feel as though, in setting out to save the paper, its reporters inadvertently set it back--which, given the current state of the business, they can hardly afford to do. For all their rage, the Posties seem to have an insufficient understanding of the gravity of their business challenges.

But the activists aren't done yet -- New York magazine wonders if Will Lewis, the CEO who hired Winnett, will be the next to be fired.

Oh, right, we're pretending these people are "voluntarily withdrawing" from high-paying, prestigious jobs to spend more time with their former jobs.

Check out CNN's Chief Deplatforming Officer Oliver Darcy, reporting that morale at the Post has "fallen off a cliff."

Oh no!

"It's as bad as I've ever seen it, truly," one staffer said Thursday, noting that The Post has hit "rough patches" before, but that the stormy atmosphere hanging over the Washington outlet is unprecedented.

Lewis' uncouth dispatching of Buzbee poisoned much of the goodwill he had earned with his employees over the preceding six months ...

Uncouth! What a sassy little skinny-jean bitch.

The "Posties" have formed a whisper network to question whether Lewis, like Winnett, just isn't a good fit with the woke failure Washington Post.

Are the Post and Lewis just not a good fit?

One lingering issue is the difference between how newsrooms are run in the U.K. versus the U.S. Politico Playbook notes that Lewis's Fleet Street attitude seems to be triggering some culture shock at the Post:

A series of emerging revelations, stemming from his announcement Sunday that executive editor Sally Buzbee would be leaving, to replaced by two close Lewis associates, have left the Post newsroom "uniformly horrified," in one reporter's words.

More consequentially, they have revealed that the clash between Lewis' rough-and-tumble sensibilities and the Post's more high-minded culture is even more profound than previously suspected: He can't seem to figure out where his Fleet Street smarts are necessary and refreshing, and where they are toxic and self-defeating.

Inside the Post, the conversation among reporters surveyed Thursday night centered on whether Lewis could continue leading the publication.

Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

(From Donnie Darko. My brother said that on occasion.)

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:20 PM

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