Walker Larson says Washington Post layoffs mark legacy-media self-immolation

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Walker Larson argues that legacy media didn’t merely lose the audience; it actively liquidated its own value proposition. In his essay for Intellectual Takeout, Larson uses the Washington Post’s reported decision to lay off roughly a third of its newsroom as a kind of autopsy photo: a once-dominant institution shrinking to match the public’s dwindling willingness to subsidize it.

The proximate cause is economic. Larson notes that Jeff Bezos has reportedly been absorbing large annual losses at the Post and finally responded with a “hatchet” to staffing. But the more interesting claim is that the losses are downstream of a self-inflicted credibility collapse. In Larson’s telling, legacy outlets tried to remain gatekeepers not of information but of “correct opinions,” and paid for it when their coverage of high-salience stories—he cites COVID-19 and Russiagate—looked less like reporting than narrative enforcement.

The Post’s retrenchment is not a tragedy; it’s market feedback. A newsroom that behaves like a political NGO should not be surprised when readers treat it like one: something other people donate to. The old business model—sell a product people want—was replaced by a prestige model—perform for peers, regulators, and friendly power centers. That works until the patron gets bored.

Larson’s piece is less a victory lap than a warning about the insurgents. Alternative media, he argues, has thrived via “guerilla warfare” enabled by the internet’s low distribution costs: independent investigators, niche publications, and adversarial entrepreneurs can now compete with institutions that once controlled the channels. He points to tactics such as undercover reporting associated with James O’Keefe as examples of the hit-and-run advantage.

But the same low barrier to entry that makes dissident reporting possible also makes grift scalable. Larson cautions that the alternative ecosystem is vulnerable to “shills, con-men, amateurs, and wackos”—and, he adds, perhaps even psychological operations—flooding the market with counter-narratives that are not true merely because they oppose the mainstream. The epistemic vice he targets is tribal inversion: if legacy media lies, then the opposite must be true.

The uncomfortable implication is that the post-gatekeeper world can devolve into competing propaganda mills unless audiences apply symmetrical skepticism. Larson’s prescription is not a return to credentialed authority, but a return to standards: demand evidence, follow conflicts of interest, and accept that both the official story and the rebellious story can be wrong at the same time. In an attention economy, that kind of intellectual discipline is the scarcest commodity—and therefore, one hopes, the most valuable.