DC now has two conservative daily papers

Michael Tomasky, New Republic -  It is The Washington Post’s right, of course, to stand for whatever it and its owner wish it to stand for. If the owner of this magazine woke up tomorrow and decided that Murray Rothbard was right about everything and The New Republic was henceforth going to follow the Cato Institute line on all matters, that would be his right, and I’d ungrudgingly go look for new employment. That’s how this business works.

So this is not a liberal whine that the Post “ought” to be liberal, although it is worth pointing out that (a) this shift effectively defenestrates 50 or 60 years of proud history, (b) a conservative stance puts the paper in a very bad odor indeed with respect to the city it purports to serve, and (c) the paper has bled enormous polemical talent over the last couple of years: Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank (still at the paper but no longer a columnist), and not least Greg Sargent and Perry Bacon, about whom I’m delighted to say that the Post’s loss is TNR’s gain. (Here’s a bonus fun fact: No matter how hard the Post swings in this reactionary rightward direction, The Wall Street Journal got there first, and they do it better.)

My point rather is that liberals, especially those of the multimillionaire and billionaire variety, need to pay close attention to this phenomenon. The nation’s capital is now served by two editorially conservative newspapers: the Post and the Unification Church’s Washington Times, still going … well, one can’t quite say “strong.” I never hear anyone talk about it or see someone link to one of its stories or columns on social media. Never. I realize they’re not exactly my crowd, but this wasn’t always the case—it seemed to me that during the Reagan and Bush 43 eras, the Times mattered more than it does now. There’s also arguably a third, The Washington Examiner. It’s now online only, but it’s a tabloid newspaper in its DNA, and very conservative.

So, chew on that: The nation’s capital, a city that is the seat of the federal government and home to many thousands of public servants, and a city that Democratic presidential candidates generally carry with around 90 percent of the vote, has three conservative voices and no longer has a single liberal newspaper