The Washington Post hasn’t had swagger in decades.
This is evident in the staff meltdown over the massive layoffs that have all but destroyed the Post. One member of the Post “tech guild” showed up to the entrance of the paper after he was let go and was bewildered that his key card didn’t work anymore. Other staffers cried and hugged on K street and called each other “comrade.”
Taking things particularly hard has been sportswriter Sally Jenkins, publishing a piece called “You Can’t Kill Swagger” in The Atlantic. “The Post Sports section is, was, no ordinary section, in heritage or in coverage,” Jenkins wrote. “It was habitually young, because it required hiring people with no sense of off-the-clockness. We moved in a close group… We came from all over, competed desperately to outwrite one another, teased one another mercilessly, loved one another.” The Post’s sportswriters were trained “to grab the pen and go, and to regard sportswriting as merely another portal through which to report on the broadest subjects: labor issues, performance enhancement, domestic violence, racism, sexism, terrorism, global corruptions such as vote-buying in the Olympics.”
Jenkins then went over Jeff Bezos and Matt Murray, the owner and editor of the Post: “Usually, when people in an office distrust feckless leaders, when they are subjected to corporate verbiage that bounces off the face and leaves a rage headache behind, they will subtly gear down their efforts,” Jenkins writes. “But my former colleagues do the opposite. For every half-wit decision by a poseur in a 42-long, slim-fit suit, they report even harder. This ethic has been especially true in the renowned Sports section, which was killed in a Zoom announcement.”
Jenkins is puffing herself up for doing the job of any journalist. She makes reporting sound like some kind of brutal triathlon. Swagger? Most of the Posties rending their garments on social media over getting kicked out couldn’t do a push-up.
The idea that the media needs swagger started with Max Tani, the media reporter for Semafor. In a column last year Tani laid it out: “A landscape of gleefully revelatory magazine exposés, aggressive newspaper investigations, feral online confrontations, and painstaking television investigations has been eroded by a confluence of factors—from rising risks of litigation and costs of insurance, which strapped media companies can hardly afford, to social media, which has given public figures growing leverage over the journalists who now increasingly carry their water. The result is a thousand stories you’ll never read, and a shrinking number of publications with the resources and guts to confront power.”
Tani’s piece was noted by Jack Shafer at Politico: “Wounded and limping,” he wrote, “doubting its own future, American journalism seems to be losing a quality that carried it through a century and a half of trials: its swagger. Swagger is the conformity-killing practice of journalism, often done in defiance of authority and custom, to tell a true story in its completeness, no matter whom it might offend.”
Swagger? These eunuchs are petrified of talking to a conservative—even if it’s a story. In 2022 I published a book, The Devil’s Triangle, that exposes a 2018 plot to destroy Brett Kavanaugh and me, who was at the time a nominee for the Supreme Court. The Devil’s Triangle is exactly the kind of “conformity-killing” journalism” that is “done in defiance of authority and custom” in order to “tell a true story in its completeness, no matter whom it might offend.”
Shafer, Politico, Axios, the Post and The New York Times refuse to review or mention my book. While reviewing a liberal book critical of Kavanaugh and me, New York Times book reviewer Alexandra Jacobs wrote she “longs for more about Mark Judge.” She could read The Devil’s Triangle. My book finally did appear in the Post when columnist Kathleen Parker called out her colleagues for ignoring my story.
The Post sports section also never reviewed my book Damn Senators, about my grandfather Joe Judge, one of the great baseball players in DC history. Swagger? These hermaphrodites are too chickenshit to interview Glenn Beck.
After the Post layoffs I found myself walking past the paper’s offices on K street. I was visiting the neighborhood to write about the launch of the new National Geographic Museum. My father had worked at National Geographic for 40 years. One of my formative experiences as a journalist came in 1986, when I met C.D.B. Bryan. Bryan was the author of Friendly Fire, a book about a family whose son was killed by friendly fire in Vietnam. The government then lied to the family of Michael Mullen about the cause of his death.
C.D.B. Bryan was an example of about how to act as a journalist—about the importance of honesty and humility. In 1976, The New York Review of Books ran a review of Friendly Fire by Diane Johnson. The piece criticized Bryan, claiming that he was “patronizing” and “condescending” to the Mullens while praising military men like Lt. Col. Norman Schwarzkopf, who’s been in Vietnam and who was interviewed by Bryan.
In a response printed in the letters section, Bryan pushed back: “I love Peg and Gene Mullen, they have been as family to me these past five years, I think of them as heroic people. Ms. Johnson’s implication that I felt ‘patronizing’ or ‘condescending’ or ‘deprecated Peg’s courage’ is so patently wrong that I am ashamed such a suggestion might even appear in print… What I tried to show was that this lowa farm family’s anger, bitterness, paranoia, suspiciousness, and heartbreak were the understandable and inevitable result of the insensitive, arrogant, and bureaucratic treatment they had received—and not just from the military, the government, their community, and their priest but, to my horror, from myself as well. I was forced to face that ugly dwarf-soul in every writer who, when confronted by someone’s personal anguish, feels that flicker of detachment which tells him that he is also witnessing ‘good material.’ To admit that does not mean one does not feel sympathy and love and understanding at the same time; it merely means that the writer recognizes that this moment of anguish provides a means of expressing that anguish to others.”
Bryan closed with this: “I do not accept Ms. Johnson’s implication that because Lt. Col. Schwarzkopf was a professional military officer that he could not also be a fine man… Why is it so inconceivable to Ms. Johnson that Gene Mullen and Norm Schwarzkopf could not both be fine men?”
Humility, courage, fairness to all sides, and enough self-reflection to see his own part in exploring a story. This is what the dying media needs and no longer has. Not swagger.