The Washington Post has been skewing unmistakably conservative in recent months — to the point where right-wing columnist Marc Thiessen declared that “we’re now a conservative opinion page.” But the Media Research Center apparently never got the message. Joseph Vazquez gushed in an Oct. 6 post:
Hold on to your britches because you’re not going to believe this one. The Washington Post Editorial Board just admitted that the so-called “Affordable Care Act,” one the most notorious pieces of Obama-era legislation foisted upon consumers by legislators and the liberal media as the saving grace of American health care, turned out to be an expensive mess.
The Post tried to play both sides of the fence in the ongoing government shutdown stand off with Republicans and Democrats, the latter of which demanded “Republicans agree to extend the Covid-era insurance subsidies without proposing any way to pay for it.” Then The Post ran one of the biggest plot twists ever to hit American politics in the last 15 years: “The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare] was never actually affordable.”
Nope, your eyes didn’t deceive you. The architects of former President Barack Obama’s 2010 “signature achievement,” wrote The Post, “assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.”
Gee, that’s an awfully different tone than the liberal rag was striking in 2024 when the editorial board celebrated how “Obamacare is working brilliantly — for now.” That’s despite the fact that premiums for individual market plans doubled in costs and “the per enrollee cost of Medicaid expansion is nearly 60 percent greater than what experts projected,” as the Paragon Health Institute summarized in an October 2024 study.
It’s as if the newspaper detected that the proverbial statute of limitations had run out and the risk of consumers viciously prosecuting them in the public square for lying to them over the years was minimal.
Vaquez concluded by grousing, “That is how the Democrat Party (sic) works. Install entitlement, blame Republicans when anyone tries to limit it in any way.”
Vazquez did it again in an Oct. 9 post:
What in the Benjamin C. Bradlee is going on with The Washington Post editorial board? After shocking the internet by conceding that Obamacare was really just an expensive mess, the newspaper seems to have red-pilled itself hard again.
The Post once again tackled the ongoing political standoff between the GOP and Democrats over the Schumer shutdown, surprisingly chastising liberal lawmakers for being stubborn by continuingly voting down the Republican clean continuing resolution (CR). Then came a jaw-dropping admission from the liberal newspaper: “The government is too big. There is plenty of fat to cut.” But the newspaper even took it a step further: “If the last week has shown anything, it’s that the federal bureaucracy performs too many ‘nonessential’ tasks that do not have a direct bearing on the lives of most citizens.”
Can pigs fly? Are we living in a parallel universe? Are chimpanzees dropping in from the cosmos? The Left will cry “state-run media.” Finding this kind of hot take within the pages of one of the most anti-Trump newspapers in circulation is like finding a real conservative on the Nicolle Wallace show.
This time, Vazquez made sure to acknowledge the driver behind the right-wing push: “It appears that Post owner Jeff Bezos’s free market reforms to his newspaper seem to be taking hold. Mazel tov.“
Nevertheless, Mark Finkelstein pretended this never happened in an Oct. 27 post:
The Washington Post‘s boastful front-page slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But on today’s Morning Joe, Post columnist David Ignatius kept viewers in the darkness regarding his own paper.
The show devoted yet another long segment to denouncing President Trump’s ballroom project, and in particular, his decision to demolish the East Wing that was deemed necessary.
[…]What Ignatius didn’t disclose was that over the weekend, the paper’s Editorial Board had published an editorial entitled, “In defense of the White House ballroom–Donald Trump vs. the NIMBYs.”
[…]Ignatius’s failure to mention the editorial was a journalistic sin of omission.
It’s unclear why Finkelstein felt the need to censor Bezos’ right-wing drift when another MRC writer had already acknowledged it.
UPDATE: The Post has a bad habit of not disclosing Bezos’ financial interests — something else the MRC failed to disclose.