Derek Thompson

purchase on a view from nowhere objective middle ground.

But I wonder how you feel about the conservative critique that once too many people associated the Washington Post with a kind of left-wing resistance politic, it hurt its ability to grow in the post-Trump years.

Politico, Axios, Punchbowl.

I mean, it'd be one thing if The Washington Post were like, you know, a tree in a Superfund site where it died because the ground underneath it was toxic.

It's like a dying redwood in a forest of redwoods.

Like, it's being decimated in an environment where a bunch of other news organizations are going.

And that tells me that the mistakes are more strategic than structural when it comes to The Post.

I do want to shift to sort of the broader changes that you've observed in the last 20 years.

You recently wrote a really interesting essay for Axios about what you've seen since between 2006 when you left the Washington Post to 2026.

It seems to me like the single most objective observation you can make about the difference in media today versus 20 years ago is that there's just more of it.

the most significant change is just a change of quantity.

And I think quantity has implications of its own.

I think quantity changes the way that people see their own role in a media environment.

If you know that you're the local monopolist,

you might feel like you have a responsibility to be something for everyone.

If you feel like you're one voice among a million, I think you're much more likely to be antagonistic, me against the world, and choose a specific ideology that represents you specifically.

So I wonder what you see as the most important implications or consequences of there just being so much more damn media in 2026 than there was 20 years ago.

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that sort of bifurcation or that barbell effect where it's so difficult, I think, to describe the state of media briefly.

because we live in a period where there is so much more insane conspiratorial bullshit.

And four-hour interviews with physicists that go deep into the nature of the universe in ways that 1957 CBS was never going to touch.