“Not just right-wing but often really dumb”: the Ballad of Adam O’Neal

Margaret Sullivan has a requiem for the palooka who agreed to bust out the Washington Post’s opinion section:

It’s hard for me to be sanguine about the damage done to the Washington Post. Until just a few years ago, I was the media columnist there, hired in 2016 by the great editor Marty Baron. It had been my lifelong dream to work at the Post, since — like many of my era — I was drawn into journalism by its Watergate reporting. Then, while a college student and student journalist at Georgetown University, the Post was my much-admired local paper. Over the years, I met its courageous publisher Katharine Graham, her brash editor Ben Bradlee, and am still honored to know her son, Don. He became the publisher and eventually sold the paper to uber-billionaire Jeff Bezos. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

There are many sad losses in journalism these days. The withering of local newspapers and the turmoil at CBS News are two of the gut-wrenchers. Like those, the sharp decline of the Post really hurts.

It’s largely the fault of Bezos, of course, and of his disastrous hand-picked chief executive, Will Lewis (also now thankfully gone). Bezos, who started off strong, has more recently been more interested in currying favor with Donald Trump. Rather than protecting his paper, a national treasure, Bezos turned it into collateral damage.

When Adam O’Neal came on last year, the millennial editor made a curious statement — that he expected never to have another journalism job. He would run the Post opinion section for the rest of his career.

Now, a little more than a year later, he has “stepped down,” though perhaps not of his own volition — some insiders have speculated he was fired. No word yet on his successor.

His mandate, direct from Bezos, was to move the section toward “personal liberties and free markets.” Ideas opposed to those two pillars were unwelcome; they would have to be published elsewhere. After trying to talk Bezos out of this, O’Neal’s predecessor, David Shipley, departed.

But O’Neal made his mark, I guess you could say. Late last year, for example, the Post published an editorial “In defense of the White House ballroom.” As Michael Tomasky of the New Republic put it, it was “a dull, moronic, straightforward defense of the president of the United States crushing to dust one-third of a building of singular historic importance that is owned by the American people, and doing so while not merely ignoring but saying a colossal fuck you to the rules and procedures that normally govern things.” Tomasky’s piece is aptly titled “The Washington Post has Become Right-Wing Even Faster Than I Thought.”

The moves were not just right-wing but often really dumb.

“One of the section’s top priorities, the launch of a new video podcast called Make It Make Sense, drew backlash on social media for what seemed like warmed-over hot takes and did not draw a large viewership despite generous investment and support from the Post,” reported Jeremy Barr at the Guardian US.

My “favorite” episode of MAKE IT MAKE SENSE –well, the only one I’ve watched, which makes it one more than 99.99999999999999999999999% of the American public — involved having one of its smarm merchants rant about…municipal codes in Amsterdam, one of the issues surely most important to the American voter. Did it give a moment’s consideration to why people in Amsterdam might be particularly concerned about climate change? I think you know the answer!

The section also posted one clunker after another of weird commentary. Just days ago, we were treated to a wide-eyed take on the traditional baby names that affluent parents give their children. Do treat yourself by reading Parker Molloy’s wicked takedown here.

Of course, none of this measures up to Bezos’s original sin regarding his paper’s opinion section. In late 2024, just before the presidential election, he spiked the editorial board’s planned endorsement editorial of Kamala Harris. So much for editorial independence. And what a foolhardy business decision. That move infuriated hordes of longtime Post readers and resulted in hundreds of thousands of lost subscriptions.

The Post — which had become profitable less than a decade ago — has been losing vast millions of dollars a year. In February, management laid off almost half the newsroom.

The body blow to this great newsroom, an assemblage of talent and practices that took so long to build, was nothing short of tragic.

O’Neal’s tenure was just one small part of the whole mess, but a telling one. It was wrong from the start. And now it’s over.

Of course, the larger problem is that nobody who wants the job of taking an top editorial position for Don Bezos should ever have any job in journalism by definition.