The Washington Post Goes Metal With A New Slogan

The Washington Post goes dark and dire with a new slogan

If you get your news through the Washington Post website, you may have noticed a slight change. It’s nothing huge, exactly. The award-winning reporting is the same. The font remains unchanged. The Post has not majorly changed hands recently.

No, the difference is in the slogan, just below the title itself. It now reads, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.

Excuse us while we go lay on our bedroom floor, listening to Gary Jules’ “Mad World” and letting the tears well up in our eyes.

Supposedly, this new slogan came about not in response to the stream of journalism-directed invectives constantly flowing from Trump’s mouth. Instead, the Post claims that the slogan accompanies the launch of Snapchat Discover, a new service intended to bring in younger readers on mobile platforms.

The timing is awfully convenient, however.

The new slogan is apparently partially based on Jeff Bezos quote in a 2016 interview. Bezos acquired the Post in 2013. It’s also a favorite phrase of Bob Woodward, the famous Washington Post reporter who broke news of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein in 1972. Woodward is now an associate editor for the Post.

Embed from Getty Images

Opinion on the slogan change – which, so far, appears only on the Post’s website – are varied. Some think it’s an appropriate response to an increasingly dire reporting landscape. After all, Trump has called the media “the enemy of the American people”. It’s hard not to feel like we’re in dark times already, and so a heavy slogan such as this one feels appropriate.

It is Over Dramatic?

However, others think this is a little much. It’s overly dramatic they say, the equivalent of your teenage self screaming about “sheeple” while applying another layer of eyeliner. Stephen Colbert has said that the Washington Post has “officially entered its goth phase”.

Some have argued that the wording itself is enough to make you sob into your cornflakes. “Dies” and “darkness” are tough things to see first thing in the morning these days. But, then again, newspapers throughout history have used their slogans and taglines to boast, chide, shout, and scream various views. The New York Times’ masthead claims that it is “All The News That’s Fit to Print”. Pretty grandiose in itself.

Perhaps these papers have earned it. After all, the Washington Post is rightfully regarded as one of the top newspapers in the nation. It has transformed itself into one of the premier sources of political reporting since the days of Woodward and Bernstein. Furthermore, while we don’t want to push our fellow citizens into terrified panic attacks, neither do we want to pretend that everything’s just fine.

It isn’t, after all. Democracy really can die without the support of both its citizenry and honest, unfettered reporting. Currently, that tradition of American journalism is under direct attack from a presidential administration that howls “fake news” whenever a news outlet publishes something unfavorable. Such are the marks of a burgeoning tyrant.

Next: 10 Female Scientists of Color You Should Know

So, yeah. It’s a little much, but then we are living in such wildly biased, quickly moving times that “a little much” might be just enough.