I’m pondering whether to stop subscribing to the Washington Post digital version. I only do it for Ethics Alarms, and even then I am only moved to check the site every ten days or so. Now the once-essential newspaper is falling apart in chunks, and whether it can be saved—or should be— is very much in doubt.

Jeff Bezos is trying to do a Elon Musk imitation, saving the icon by making it less flagrantly biased and such a shameless progressive and Democratic propaganda engine. The problem is that when all of a paper’s subscribers, or most of them, are Trump-Deranged, pro-totalitarian leftists who want their news media to be a tool of a single party and the government if that party has it by the throat, making a sudden commitment to objectivity, fairness and ethical journalism will not be welcome.

The New York Post gleefully reported that its Washington cousin has lost an astounding 90% of its subscribers since 2021. Yikes. As this was happening, the Post’s uber-woke staff has rebelled because Bezos has taken baby steps towards neutrality, like not endorsing the worst Presidential candidate any major party has run, well, maybe ever. The Horror!

Earlier this month, a hack Axis political cartoonist threw a hissy fit because her juvenile cartoon (attacking major business figures for not furiously opposing an incoming President as was common practice before hyper-partisanship began tearing the country apart) was rejected. Next Jennifer Rubin, the former arch conservative who flipped from dark red to neon blue when Trump was elected, announced she was quitting the paper in protest (she should have been fired years ago: she was an irrational knee-jerk Republican and now is an irrational knee-jerk Democrat, but a jerk is a jerk).

The Post still has one-note, intellectually dishonest leftist liars like Philip Bump and Dana Milbank to thrill the cockles of Trump Haters along with reliably biased but slightly more professional progressives Ruth Marcus, Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, Kathleen Parker and others to keep the faith. But even if you want to get your news from a leftist fake news purveyor, why choose the Post when the New York Times is almost as biased but still does better work when politics aren’t involved?

And now Bezos has approved a particular bad mission motto. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the pompous predecessor, was particularly embarrassing for a paper that embargoed the Hunter Biden laptop story and didn’t bother to investigate the Constitutional crisis and scam going on right under its own metaphorical nose, with the President of the United States sinking into dementia while persons unknown and unelected actually ran the Executive Branch. If democracy dies in darkness and a newspaper deliberately contributes to that darkness, what does that make the people who support it?

The new slogan is arguably worse: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

It’s nice to have a fake news platform admit that it publicizes stories rather than facts, I suppose, but I think I’ll pass. Isn’t that an admission that the paper deals in narratives, spinning and manipulating events to draw attention, clicks and shares, without prioritizing little matters like truth, reality, inconvenient facts (they get in the way of good stories, you know) and boring details? Demagogues can be riveting. Tall tales can be emotionally involving and gripping. Heck, our soon to be ex-President told lots of entertaining stories that he represented as true: remember his uncle being eaten by cannibals? Or the one about Donald Trump saying that white supremacists were “very fine people”?

I’ll give some ethics brownie points to Bezos for being transparent about what his paper and the rest of the mainstream media does rather than report the news; not like the Times, which leaves out a lot of “news that’s fit to print” when it suits its editors’ partisan agendas. Still, I’m old fashioned: I go to novels, movies and Netflix when I want riveting stories. I want a newspaper to just tell me what I need to know without making me feel like I’m in a North Korean brainwashing camp.