Pivoting to video, and other fresh ideas from newspaper publisher Jeff Bezos

Speaking of Bari Weiss, we recently referenced one of her stars trying to OWN John Oliver and stepping on to a football field full of rakes:

The author of an historically malevolent piece of journalism has not been shy about using social media to let us all know how none of her friends like her anymore, on account of all the genocide denial she considers to be her day job. Now she’s using it for a different purpose, and that is revealing to the world that she does not understand how to tell, or possibly even recognize, a joke.

I just want to make sure you’re prepared for what you’re about to be confronted with. Click play on the video below and you will see Reingold attempting to parody John Oliver, who recently did a segment on The Free Press and spent quite a bit of time making fun of Reingold. The result of Reingold’s attempt to give Oliver a little taste of his own medicine is a truly disastrous attempt at comedy, which was quickly deleted from her Instagram account.

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[image or embed]— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) Oct 26, 2025 at 9:38 PM

Well, OK, that wasn’t very good. Most people stop following through on the urge to film unfunny “bits” shortly after entering adulthood, but maybe Reingold just didn’t hang out with enough skaters in high school. Everyone’s life inches along a different path!

But, hey, it’s no hanging crime to be bad at comedy, to try out an omnilingual accent, to be more cringe that the “Scott’s Tots” episode of The Office without even trying, etc. And between her evident insecurity and none of the people involved with having the decency to tell her that this needed to remain a private venting, it’s ultimately kind of sad. But what’s saddest at all is what it reveals about the destruction of another major pillar of American journalism:

There’s not much to take from Reingold’s performance, other than concern for anyone who has ever been forced to interact with her in a social setting, but the timing of its arrival reveals some insight elsewhere. Semafor’s Max Tani reported in his weekly newsletter that Washington Post CEO Will Lewis, with the blessing of owner Jeff Bezos, recently tried to hire Reingold away from the Free Press and make her “one of the first new faces in the paper’s overhauled opinion section.” The plan, according to Tani, was to “hire Reingold to create written and video opinion content.”

You can spend a lot of time thinking about how and why the current media environment got so bad. A lot of smart people have written articles on the subject that you might find helpful. But sometimes a particularly clarifying incident comes along, and this is one of them. The men in charge of one of the biggest newspapers in the country thought it would be a good idea to make someone who would bomb at the middle school talent show the new face of their video-based opinion section.

It’s not just that they wanted to PIVOT TO VIDEO like it’s 2014, their model was apparently to bring back Mouthpiece Theater and make it 50% more cringe, surprising the MIT engineers who had told them that this was physically impossible.

One could speculate that Bezos and the Murdoch third-stringer he made his Charles Marimow just want to wreck their publication and just don’t care how much money they lose. That may be right. But my read on the situation is that Bezos and Lewis sincerely believe that they can turn the paper into a regime mouthpiece and make money. (Bari just got a big ca-ching, after all, and Lewis’s former boss has a Republican news network that is both very influential and very profitable.) But neither of them have any idea what they’re doing or any actual plan for replacing the hundreds of thousands of subscribers that they’ve chased away.