The End of an Era: Conventional Wisdom is Dead

Media layoffs and a continuing stream of disclosures reveal an unprecedented collapse of the American political consensus

END OF AN ERA? Clockwise from top left, NPR CEO Katherine Maher, CBS late show icon Stephen Colbert, Washington Post gadfly Philip Bump, and Pulitzer-winning columnist Jonathan Capehart

Over the weekend it was announced that a gaggle of well-known Washington Post opinion-makers, from Philip Bump to Jonathan Capehart to Catherine Rampe to Karen Attiah, were taking buyout offers from Jeff Bezos and the Post, amid news of a 250,000 plunge in subscriptions. This comes on the heels of the recent firing of CBS icon Stephen Colbert, the vote to defund NPR, and previous overhauls at MSNBC (which let go most of Rachel Maddow’s staff as well as canceling The ReidOut), CNN (which let go 6% of its workforce in January), and ABC (which shuttered 538.com and laid off 75 employees in March), to say nothing of recent staff reductions at Vox Media, HuffPost, and other companies.

The Conventional Wisdom machine is coming apart in chunks. News dropped that fact-checking celebritoid Glenn Kessler took the buyout just moments ago; he was lampooned here last week. If you shut your air conditioner off, you’ll hear screams and revving chainsaws from 30 Rock to the CNN Center. With apologies for bluntness, the mainstream press fucked around, now the mainstream press is finding out: