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The Washington Post: Democracy's Defender?
A long forgotten speech by the late publisher Katherine Graham explains why the Post is the way it is.
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Of late, much abuse has been directed at Jeff Bezos for his plan to reorient the opinion pages at The Washington Post, “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
Not that you would know it by the outrage that followed, but the Post’s opinion pages were never any great shake. Bezos is simply swapping out an outdated neoconservatism with a variant of libertarianism—minus, of course, libertarianism's anti-war message. Sounds to me like more of the same—only worse. In any case, in recent years the Post’s reporting section has been even worse than its opinion section. The fact is that both sides of the house —reporting and opinion—have, in the years following Trump’s election in 2016, been marked by their subservience to the organs of the national security state—and nowhere is this more true than in the case of the Post's reporting on Russia-gate.
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Put another way: The Post is Washington’s most public manifestation of liberalism’s authoritarian soul. In a new and important paper, Ghosts of Liberalism Past: Authoritarianism and Nationalism in the Liberal Tradition*, Dr. Anatol Lieven draws attention to Immanuel Wallerstein’s assertion that,
…Liberalism has always been in the end an ideology of the strong state in the sheep’s clothing of individualism; or to be precise, the ideology of the strong state as the only sure guarantor of liberalism.”
And, as it happens, at the very moment I was writing this, I received an email from a friend linking to a Washington Post story, pushed this afternoon, about Trump’s nominee for DC US Attorney, Ed Martin. Martin has been the acting DCUSA since the start of the administration. He replaced Matthew Graves who set the District back decades through his steadfast refusal to prosecute cases brought to him by Washington’s Metropolitan Police.
So what is the Post’s new scoop about Mr. Ed Martin? Well, he appeared on the Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik over 150 times between 2016 and 2024.
And if that weren’t bad enough, Martin’s frequent appearances,
…drew rebukes from some national security analysts, who accused him of amplifying anti-American propaganda on Russian outlets that the State Department last year said had moved beyond disinformation to engage in covert influence activities aimed at undermining democracies worldwide for President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Well, if the Biden State Department said it…it must be true.
While the report comes across as a transparent attempt to sink a Trump nominee, one will search in vain for any mention the copiously well-documented ties between US intelligence and CNN; or for any acknowledgement that in the UK, the government issues D-Notices (Defense and Security Media Advisory Notices) to keep its domestic media in line. As a former high level British diplomat told me recently, “this is where the government says ‘These are our lines’—a bit like what the presidential administration in Moscow does.”
Mr. Ed Martin, the Post is telling us, is a Russian plant owing to his appearances on Russia-state media. The Senate must reject his nomination forthwith.
And this brings us back to Anatol Lieven, who, in the aforementioned Ghosts of Liberalism Past, notes that,
…accusing your political opponents of being in effect traitors hardly comports with professed commitments to free and open debate. In the United States, for liberals to foster domestic fears of a “fifth column” risks reawakening the syndrome analyzed by Louis Hartz in the wake of McCarthyism, of domestic repression and mass chauvinist hysteria justified in the name of defending democracy.”
The simple fact of the matter is that “democracy died in darkness” some time ago—thanks in part to the late owner and publisher of the The Washington Post, Katherine Graham. Indeed, it isn't a mystery why the Post operates in the manner it does. Rather than functioning as a critic of power, without fear or favor (in Adolph Ochs’ felicitous phrase), the Post acts as a stenographer for the defense and intelligence communities, because that's how Kay Graham wanted it to operate.
As the late great Alexander Cockburn and his frequent collaborator Jeffery St. Clair noted in a survey of Graham’s career, “Editors and reporters are not slow to pick up clues as to the disposition of the person who pays the wages, and Mrs Graham sent out plenty of those.”
In a remarkable speech given to the CIA on November 16, 1988 (the full speech was declassified in 2012), Graham made her priorities clear.
“How,” she asked.
…can national security be preserved —and national interests advanced—when the press decides what to print, even about the most sensitive government secrets? Why is the press insistent about preserving this right, when mistakes can be made that potentially harm national security?”
She continued,
…it is an inescapable irony of democratic government that official secrecy is necessary to preserve liberty. We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. The government must have a classification system and should discipline employees who violate security regulations.”
The Post’s fealty towards the national security state, then and now, is its defining feature.
*Featured in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism (OUP 2025), Chapter 7, pp. 175-206
James W. Carden is editor of TRR.
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© 2025 James W. Carden
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