This transcription has been lightly edited for clarity.
Thank you so much. Thank you all for being here tonight and for supporting KHOL. My husband John is here, he’s on the board of KHOL and we just feel—oh, there you are, hello.
I’m not going to wear that hat, though.
We’re just so lucky and so grateful to be part of this community. And an essential part of any community is having a media ecosystem that can help knit us together, and we are lucky in Jackson to have KHOL, we’re lucky to have the news and guide, we’re lucky to have WyoFile.
We can all disagree about things that are going on in the world, but we have to have a way to operate from a shared set of facts. And if we don’t have the media to—and reporters—to help gather facts for us, we can’t have the kind of vibrant community that we have. And we can’t have the kind of informed electorate that we need.
We are in quite a moment. I think that “moment” is the calm and restrained way to put it. The media is under incredible stress nationwide. When I was thinking about the Washington Post, I was looking up the population —and we cover three metropolitan areas at the Washington Post—and as you hear me talk about the Washington Post I’m gonna keep saying “we” because this is an institution that’s part of my soul. I was there nearly four decades. It’s actually 40 years, six months, and six days. And that does not include my summer internship or the time I spent when I was supposedly finishing my third year of law school and I was an intern at the Post for the summer. But I’m going to get to the Post and my departure from the Post a little bit later.
I wanted to start out by talking about the media landscape writ large, but I actually didn’t get to the point I wanted to make earlier, which was that the Post covers somewhere between 4 and 6 million people. It is now in our three areas: in the District, in Maryland and Virginia. It once had a metro staff that was 200. The metro staff has been reduced to something like 12 reporters.
There are more reporters per capita covering local government and the local area here in Jackson than we have at the Washington Post. And that is a testament to the wonderful work that the Jackson media is doing. I was so excited to see that the sports staff was in Milan covering Breezy Johnson. That is just great. So, you know, really great to have that look, the kind of coverage that only the local paper can do and the local institution can do. About our local Olympian. Yay.
So whatever is happening here, we are in the midst of a terrible situation for the news media nationwide and possibly worldwide. And it’s really a kind of two-pronged assault. The first thing is that our business model has just collapsed. The internet has brought us the ability read, if we can get past the paywall, and aren’t willing to pay for it, any news at any time from anywhere. And that’s a terrific thing. You know, people can read me in Kyiv. And people can read me in Kentucky. And that’s a great thing.
But the problem is that the financial model that’s supported this for so many years has also been destroyed by the internet that brings my work and the work of so many other people to people across the country. We used to have a captive audience. If you were the local department store, yes there used to be local department stores, you had to buy a display ad, if you had jobs to advertise you needed to buy. Help wanted ads. If you had a house to sell, you needed to buy an ad in the real estate section; that’s all gone and we haven’t figured out how to create the revenue with display, with digital advertising or with subscriptions to make up that difference.
And the thing that is lurking out there that you might not have thought of is the additional impact that is socking us from AI. I have now started asking my questions for AI. What is the population of the DMV? AI was a little confused about whether I was talking about the Department of Motor Vehicles, but it got smart, and once it realized, it was the District, Maryland and Virginia, it spit out an answer. So I didn’t have to click on a website or news website, and that means that our search traffic, which generates what dwindling revenue we have from digital advertising, has gone into the toilet, and so as AI gets better, as we all get more reliant on it the business model becomes increasingly problematic and under stress.
But there’s another level of stress that we are dealing with as well, and that is the unprecedented assault on the media. When I say unprecedented assault on the media, look –-we have never been the most popular folks around, maybe not with this audience, because you are self-selected and obviously extremely intelligent and good-looking, each and every one of you. But we’ve been a punching bag. I’m old enough to remember, though I was not a grown-up journalist at the time, the Nixon administration going after the nattering nabobs of negativism in the press. But I never imagined in my life that I would be dealing with a president who called us the enemy of the people, that we would be derided as fake news, that the president of the United States would look at a female reporter who was trying to ask him a perfectly reasonable question and say, “quiet, piggy.” This is just a step beyond.
And. I will tell you honestly, it takes an emotional toll. My colleagues and I did not go into journalism to make money. We went into it because we thought it was a calling, because we were serving the public interest in the way that we best understood how to serve the public interests, and now we’re being called enemies of the people. But that started during the first Trump administration.
Now things have gotten to an even more dangerous moment because it’s not just nasty words right now. And I have a little list here so I’m gonna be looking at it. We had FBI agents turn up at the home of a Washington Post reporter at 6.30 in the morning.
Parens: Washington is a small town, so as it happens, Hannah Nathanson, I have known since she was in kindergarten, because she went to school with our youngest daughter. She’s a hell of a soccer player. She’s an even bigger hell of a reporter.
But how terrifying is it? You’re doing your job and FBI agents are banging at your door at 6.30 in the morning, serving you with a search warrant, seizing your phones, seizing your laptops. Thank goodness she has the backing of what remains of the Washington Post to help her out. But this is literally unprecedented.
Other administrations, Democrat and Republican, have tangled with reporters and thought about subpoenaing reporters and demanded their notes. But searching their houses is a step that only this administration has taken. Arresting reporters for reporting is a step only this administration has taken in the form of Don Lemon and the other journalist who was arrested for going into the church to cover the protest.
I don’t know the facts of the case. I would go to a Church and cover a protest. If I were asked to leave by the church, I would probably leave. There are First Amendment rights on both sides of this transaction, and people shouldn’t be interfering with worshippers. But the notion that a magistrate turned out, a magistrate’s judge refused to issue this warrant. They appealed that. They found a way to arrest him again. It’s just another example of the way in which this administration is willing to not just “retoracize” its war —I know that’s not a word, but I couldn’t come up with a better one – retoracized its war on the press. I’m just going to see if it catches on. Probably not. But to weaponize it – those are just the most recent examples.
The AP cannot adequately cover the White House because it will not kowtow to this administration in calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The Pentagon press corps —one of the most professional and responsible press corps around because they understand what it’s like to be with the troops and the care you have to take in doing that reporting—has been ousted from its role because it wouldn’t buckle to demands about that basically said, you can be reporters at the Pentagon, but only if you promise to be stenographers and only report what we have told you, you may report. That is not journalism. That’s stenography. That is not what Thomas Jefferson was talking about when he said, if I had a choice between government without newspapers and newspapers without government. I would choose the newspapers without government. We know that that is not true.
And then you have the situation where journalistic enterprises, large commercial enterprises that may happen to have newspapers or television broadcast networks or sets of television stations as part of their holdings, are in the most craven possible fashion, settling completely baseless lawsuits. Brought by President Trump personally, suing them. The most egregious example of this, of course, is CBS settling a lawsuit brought by President Trump over allegedly misleading editing of its interview with Kamala Harris when she was running for president. The notion that $16 million [was] paid to the future Trump presidential library—can’t wait to visit that—for doing what is a basic journalistic function. We edit interviews all the time. And the notion that they paid this off is a stain on CBS. I can’t put it any other way.
That kind of gets me to the Washington Post. I left the Washington Post in March of 2025. I left because I had written a column that criticized Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of the Washington Post had issued an edict saying that we on the editorial page and in the opinion section would heretofore have two pillars that we covered, free markets, and by the way, I believe in free markets and individual liberties, and by the way I believe even more in individual liberties. But he said, dissent from these views will no longer be tolerated or published; people who are looking for dissenting views can look elsewhere.
I had been an editor overseeing the op-ed section of The Post for many years. And in that context, I had had a lot of interaction with Jeff Bezos, in which we talked about the importance of having a diversity of views on the opinion page. And so the notion, and I spent a lot of time because most of our conservative columnists had turned out to be never Trumpers. Looking for Trump empathetic columnists to make sure we had this robust diversity of views. So this edict from Jeff Bezos was a completely different Bezos than the one I had encountered. I wrote my column, I tried to write it in a way that wouldn’t inflame the powers that be, but that would express my respectful disagreement.
Previously, I had written a column that the post had published without any hesitation whatsoever, disagreeing with the also terrible decision to pull our endorsement of Kamala Harris, our already written endorsement of Kamala Harris 11 days before the election. It is not a terrible thing for a newspaper to decide it’s not gonna have presidential endorsements. Readers need guides about endorsements for local offices where they don’t have enough ability to figure out for themselves who the best candidate is. But you guys didn’t need any help from any newspaper around to tell you who you wanted to vote for for president. So if a newspaper wanted to decide it wasn’t going to have presidential endorsements, that’s fine. Don’t do it 11 days before the election. Don’t it when the editorial is already drafted. Don’t do it when it’s going to appear, whatever your intentions are. that you are doing nothing but sucking up to Donald Trump, who’s probably going to win that election.
So when the newspaper called that day and said I’m going to write a column about the non-endorsement, they said, great, we’ll run it. When I said I’ve written a column, and here it is, about the new constrained two pillars, only no dissent allowed opinion section, I was told that this did not rise to the level of the high bar that was necessary for us to cover ourselves. That the publisher, the now the ex-publisher, yay, had made this decision himself. And that no, he would not meet with me despite the fact that I had been at the Washington Post for 40 years, six months, and six days, because there was no point in speaking to me because his mind was made up.
So I saw the writing on the wall. It was time for me to go. It might have been time for me to go, honestly, before that. But that doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t break at what is happening at the post now. If you’ve read that the post cut 30% of its staff, that is not accurate. It’s actually, I mean, it’s not accurate because they wouldn’t give us numbers on day one and they still haven’t given us numbers, but the reality is the cuts are deeper than that. It’s closer to 50% of the staff.
And the cuts are devastating. Jeff Bezos, apparently, though he could sustain losses of $100 million a year, I calculated it based on his reported net worth for approximately two millennia, didn’t wanna do that. He is a businessman. That is his prerogative.
But here are the cuts. The Metro staff, as I mentioned before, had already been cut in half. It’s down to 12 reporters. Most of the foreign bureaus are shuttered. All of the photojournalists, photographers, and videographers are gone. Our book section is closed. Our audio podcast is turned off. The sports section, which I don’t actually read sports. I’m reading a lot of Olympic coverage these days. But the sports section which has been like one of the crown jewels of the newspaper with some of the greatest sports journalists in America is closed. There will be four reporters remaining who will write about sports culture and things like that, but they will not cover our local teams. This is a disaster.
On many levels, we need vibrant local journalism, the kind of local journalism we have here, the kind local journalism that KHOL and the others are practicing, and delivering. We need that. But we also need flagship newspapers, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times in a better day, and the Washington Post.
On a Better Day, to do the kind of journalism that takes money, that takes time, that takes resources, is that only these large national institutions can do, there are others that have come up, there are websites like ProPublica that do wonderful things, and I welcome all of that. But if the Washington Post becomes this kind of shriveled, shrunken, enfeebled version of what it used to be, and it is frankly, it’s hard to say that, but it’s also hard to see how that is not gonna be the inevitable result of what we’re seeing here. It sounds grandiose to say this, but that’s just not bad. That’s not just bad for my colleagues at the Washington Post who will remain, though everybody who can is fleeing to elsewhere. It’s not bad for our local jurisdiction. It’s bad for democracy, because a wise man once said democracy dies in darkness. And though I once thought that was kind of cheesy, it’s true and democracy dies when you choke off the journalism that illuminates its activities and when you just, the post management is talking about how we’re, you know. Going to really concentrate on our core mission. Our core mission is shedding light on a lot of different things and spending a lot of time that might turn into a story and that might turnout to be a dry hole of an investigation.
And for Jeff Bezos to have chosen to choke off our resources is not just a tragedy, but it’s really an unnecessary tragedy. Others will fill that space. The New York Times, thank goodness, is thriving. Wordle helps. A great cooking app helps. I hear there is a sports site called The Athletic that helps. But the Times needs competitors. And there is too much going on for… One or two newspapers to bear the brunt of the essential reporting that we have to do. So I’m leaving you in a little bit of a… Downer moment, but just to express some hope that others will come and fill the void that my dire predictions of an enfeebled Washington Post are inaccurate. I’ve never so much wanted to be wrong. When I quit, my mom was like, I’m proud of you, I think, but are you sure you did the right thing? Because… Things look pretty good to me right now. It doesn’t seem things have changed. And of course, the editorial section completely changed after I left. And it was just sort of good that I leapt out the door before I was pushed out the doors.
We are lucky here in Jackson to have a vibrant local press. I hope other jurisdictions will hear about Pinedale and the Roundup and others across the country will get the essential local coverage that they need. But we also have to pray for the ability of national newspapers to do the job that is even more essential in these really trying times because we’re not the enemy of the people, we are the servants of the people. At least we try to be. Thank you so much.
