About two years ago, I subscribed to The Washington Post online. I liked their international news coverage, and the online subscription seemed like a relatively inexpensive way to keep up on that stuff. I won’t be renewing my subscription when it expires, however, because it is becoming harder to find the international news in the WaPo, and “Today’s Headlines,” the newsletter I receive, is basically just all Donald Trump all the time. Actually, it’s not all President Trump all the time; it’s all President-Trump-is-the-worst-president-ever all the time. It’s getting tiring – and, more importantly, I’m not learning anything from it. I didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016 (either in the primaries or the general election), and I’m not going to vote for him in 2020, but that doesn’t mean I want to read about how bad he is all the time.
Even though I didn’t vote for him, I don’t think that everything he does, or his administration does, is the worst that any president/administration has ever done. Some kind of semi-rational analysis would be interesting, and I might learn something from it. I am not talking about the kind of so-called balance that includes an equal number of quotes from each side. But one anonymous source after another, followed by quotes from people who are already fully on the other side, doesn’t tell me anything new, either. Now, it could be that these articles are accurate, in the view of The Washington Post’s editors, and that everything they say is the truth. But even if it is, I am not learning anything from reading it again and again. So, it’s goodbye WaPo, until your news pages give me a little more information that I don’t already know.
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