The 'Washington Post', between Scylla and Charybdis

The head of Opinion at the Washington Post, Adam O’Neil, has resigned after just one year leading such a delicate section. He took the helm, moreover, after his predecessor, David Shipley, had quit, disagreeing with owner Jeff Bezos’s plans to shift the editorial stance to much more liberal positions, demanding minimal state intervention in markets. Still under the influence of Christopher Nolan’s remarkable adaptation – it should be stressed for the purists: adaptation – of the Odyssey, it occurs to me that the newspaper finds itself trapped between Scylla and Charybdis. And, like Ulysses, it has chosen the certain risk of losing feathers rather than risking sacrificing the whole chicken. Of course, here the body count is not limited to six, as with the mythological beast sung by Homer, since to the resignations we must add the successive layoffs that have halved the newsroom. What was once a proud galley now presents a much more battered state, but still capable of producing good journalism. Only that, on the other side of the strait, Charybdis awaits, with its formidable whirlpools that swallow everything and which, without enough rowers, could end up swallowing the ship into the abyss of irrelevance.

With fewer journalists to produce news and an opinion designed above all to satisfy the corporate interests of the owner, who will the Washington Post seduce? Bezos has been erratic, to put it mildly, in his management of the newspaper he intended to save to feed his vanity. But the drama is that Circe’s advice is listened to too much in one’s ear and, in this metaphor, the sorceress is not the radiant Charlize Theron from the film but a much more spoiled Donald Trump, who keeps him tied to the lotus flower of government contracts. The film is epic... and reality, a drama.