Why Did the Washington Post Survivors Use the Super Bowl to Promote Colin Kaepernick?

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at recent reporting from the Washington Post amid mass layoffs at the paper, and cover more media misses.

Washington Post Reporters are Stuck in 2016

After the Washington Post laid off 30 percent of its journalistic workforce last week, reporters at the paper — and throughout the mainstream media more broadly — blamed the outcome on owner Jeff Bezos’s lack of respect for journalism’s unique societal contribution.

"This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations," former Executive Editor Marty Baron said in a statement in response to the layoffs. "The Washington Post's ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever."

He went on to blame Bezos for a series of “ill-conceived decisions,” including holding the paper’s editorial page back from endorsing Kamala Harris for president in 2024.

And while it's true that some 250,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions in the wake of that decision and the editorial page’s overall shift toward promoting individual liberty and free markets, the paper’s financial state was dire long before that.

Rather than responding to the cuts with a determination to innovate, reporters at the Post seem stuck in 2016, when anti-Trump reporting appealing solely to the left was seen as a solid way to bring in readers.

As part of the cuts, the Post shut down its entire sports desk. National sports reporter Adam Kilgore managed to hold onto his job, moving to the features desk. This week, the paper published Kilgore's final story for the now-shuttered sports desk, an article Kilgore decided to dedicate to a since-forgotten 2016 main character: Colin Kaepernick.

That’s right, in a major week for sports news that brought with it the start of the winter Olympics in Milan and Super Bowl LX, the Post chose to dedicate an entire report to the one-time San Francisco 49ers quarterback who hasn’t played in the NFL in nine years.

In an article titled, “What do we make of Colin Kaepernick now?” Kilgore actually goes so far as to call Kaepernick “the most relevant figure to Super Bowl LX.”

“The Super Bowl is being played in his former home stadium, at a societal moment that echoes the issues he forced football fans to confront. So why is he out of mind?” a subheading for the piece asks.

Kilgore goes on to explain why he believes Kaepernick should be top of mind: “The game will be played in his former home stadium, in the place where his protest made him a national lightning rod and a global symbol. The social issues swirling around America’s largest sporting spectacle carry distinct echoes of what prompted his actions and what led to his exile. And yet he remains outside the conversation and invisible within the confines of the NFL.”

“Colin Kaepernick might as well be a ghost,” he added.

Readers who clicked in to read about how Kaepernick’s past controversy over kneeling during the national anthem was (unsurprisingly) absent from the public discussion over Sunday’s big game, were also met with equally political story recommendations from the sports section: “Nothing could stop the U.S. figure skating team. Not even JD Vance’s motorcade,” read one suggested headline. “Representing the red, white and blue is complicated for some Olympians,” read another.

The reporting clearly favors one side of the political aisle, and it’s certainly not the right, as critics of the Post layoffs have claimed.

NR’s Noah Rothman succinctly captured the left-wing sentiment over the layoffs:

“There is not a serious market for ‘hard news’ for conservatives,” Slate contributor Alex Kirshner wrote, articulating a version of Matt Yglesias’s self-satisfied and evidentiarily deficient claim that “conservatives don’t like to read.” To compel the Post’s scribes to cater to an ideologically right-of-center audience, too, is to ask them to do “an impossible job.” MSNOW host Chris Hayes agreed with Kirshner. “This is the fundamental truth that I’ve watched generations of media executives try desperately to avoid learning,” he scowled.

But Bezos had lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the paper since purchasing it in 2013. His decision to shift the focus of its opinion page to differentiate it from its competitors likely makes commercial sense, and furthermore, is in keeping with a long tradition of American newspaper owners orienting their opinion pages around their own political and cultural beliefs, while maintaining a firewall, of varying heights, between themselves and their paper’s reportorial product.

And the paper’s readership suffered long before the change, which came less than a year ago. In 2023, the paper lost $77 million. The next year, $100 million. And despite reporters’ insistence that billionaire owner Bezos could and should absorb the losses, the companies that own the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have both earned record profits.

Even before the paper lost 250,000 subscribers to outrage over its editorial choices, the Post was already struggling with subscriptions in 2023, when the New York Times reported that the paper has “struggled to increase the number of its paying customers since the 2020 election, when its digital subscriptions peaked at three million.” By 2023, the number of subscribers had already dropped to 2.5 million.

Last year, the paper’s print circulation fell below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years.

As part of the latest shakeup, which will still leave the newsroom sitting at a sizable 500 reporters, Post publisher and chief executive Will Lewis announced he would be stepping down from his role last week after two years at the paper.

Executive Editor Matt Murray told staff the paper will now shift its focus onto U.S. politics and national security, along with other subjects that readers have shown interest in, including health and wellness.

Headline Fail of the Week

“Community devastated after congregant arrested during immigration raid on L.A. church grounds,” reported local Los Angeles news station KTLA.

The story was published on Monday without a comment from the Department of Homeland Security that refuted the station’s version of events. Despite DHS officials posting screenshot evidence that its press office had responded to a request for comment on Monday, the story wasn’t updated with the agency’s response until Tuesday.

DHS accused the station of “dishonest” reporting over the story that claimed an “immigration raid” had taken place “on L.A. church grounds” in which a “beloved community member” was arrested.

"This is dishonest reporting by @KTLA. KTLA omitted our official statement, sent to them yesterday, which clearly states that U.S. Border Patrol did NOT target the United Methodist Church or its parking lot in North Hills, California. We look forward to them updating their story, but screenshots are forever," DHS wrote in a post on X.

Instead, the agency says agents were targeting Carlos Chavez-Guzman, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, who fled from law enforcement at the time of his arrest. The chase ended in the church parking lot.

Media Misses

• Former MSNBC host Joy Reid offered a racially charged evaluation of the evolving political relationship between President Trump and rapper Nicki Minaj.

"There’s a reason that the other side is giddy about having Nicki Minaj, a rapper they despise, a rapper they don't respect, a rapper most of them probably have never heard one of her songs, and if they have, they're horrified," Reid said. "The reason they want her on a leash as their house pet cuddled at Donald Trump's feet, the reason she is the new house pet is because they need, N-E-E-E-D [sic] Black people to give them ‘cultural cool.’ Black ‘cultural cool’ has always been a powerful, powerful element in the country."

"But she not gonna work. But they're going to keep looking for somebody Black to be the face, to put blackface on MAGA, and they know that ‘cultural cool’ matters, that's why they're doing it."

• New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie distastefully suggested that Vice President JD Vance’s mother was right to have tried to sell him for drugs when he was a child. Bouie, in a series of posts on Bluesky, was criticizing the vice president over an interview with the Daily Mail where he declined to apologize to the family of Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot during an altercation with ICE agents, because he said Pretti showed up with “ill intent” at an immigration enforcement protest.

"This is a wicked man who knows he is being wicked and does it anyway," Bouie wrote. "Like, do you see that smirk? that brief 'ain’t i a stinker' grin? beneath contempt."

A social media user called Vance “pompous” and said, "No wonder his mom tried to sell him for Percocets." Bouie replied: “I can’t imagine a parent who wouldn’t sell little JD for percocet if they knew he would turn out like this.”