Washington Post's new chief to staff: "Your audience has halved; people are not reading your stuff."

Long may it continue, and it's likely to.

More than half a century ago, ABC Sports assigned Howard Cosell, the Stephen A. Smith of his day, to be part of the broadcast team for its brand-new Monday Night Football program. A family friend and football fanatic thought Cosell was ruining the broadcasts and complained to ABC. The response? We’re inundated with complaints. Cosell will be gone soon.

But ABC kept Cosell and Monday Night Football flourished. So began the movement to color commentators who make the games about themselves. Bill Walton was the reductio ad absurdum of that unfortunate development.

This episode in media history came to mind when I read that the Washington Post’s new CEO and publisher, William Lewis, told Post staffers that the paper needs a fast turnaround because it’s losing huge amounts of money ($77 million in the past year) and has lost half of its audience.

There are similarities between the two episodes. In both cases, a media mainstay has bucked the desire of a big chunk of its audience — ABC by imposing a blowhard on football fans; the Post by eschewing objective journalism and becoming a hyper-partisan left-liberal organ. In both cases, the media mainstay didn’t yield to consumer pressure. ABC stuck with Cosell. The Post has persisted with its badly slanted journalism.

But there’s also a big difference. ABC got away with, and indeed prospered from, its decision to stick with Cosell. The Post, as its CEO admits, is suffering.

Sports fans, it seems, are willing to tolerate annoying announcers in order to watch the games they love. News consumers have no incentive to tolerate organs that openly favor ideologies they don’t like.

It’s true, of course, that there are important reasons for the Post’s woes in addition to its decision to discard objectivity in reporting. The media landscape has changed to the detriment of all newspapers.

But when a large bloc of longtime readers who don’t share the Post’s biases becomes too disgusted with a paper to keep reading it, that’s a big problem for the paper.

And it’s not just conservatives who are disgusted with the Post. I know liberals who are, as well.

The sports page provides a nice incentive for those who aren’t news junkies to subscribe to a paper. I know liberals who have stopped reading the Post because its sports page, the section that interests them the most, has gone woke.

On an average day, at least half of the lead articles are either about women’s sports, which few men I know care about except at NCAA basketball tournament time, or about race, gender, transgender, etc. For example, of the four stories on the front page of the sports section today, one is about Washington’s miserable WNBA team and the other is a column accusing those who complain about the roughing up of Caitlin Clark by her WNBA opponents of racism.

It’s sad that Jerry Brewer, whose ridiculous bit of race-mongering I discussed here, isn’t the worst wokester at the Post’s sports page. He’s surpassed by Kevin Blackistone and Sally Jenkins, and at least equaled by Candace Buckner, author of today’s piece on Clark.

I also know liberal Jews who are considering canceling their subscription to the Post. Its relentless and unfair criticism of Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas has become intolerable.

It’s clear to me that the Post’s departure from normal journalistic standards in the name of left-wing and pro-Democrat activism has hurt the paper significantly. The question is: What will the new regime do about it?

The answer, I think, is: Nothing.

The reason? Even if Lewis wanted to return to less partisan and less biased journalism, he couldn’t make it happen at the Post.

ABC could have fired Cosell. The Post can’t fire its staff of lefty activists posing as journalists.

The sports page would be an easy place to begin making the Post a little less leftist, and therefore more attractive to a wider audience. But the Post isn’t going to sack Blackistone, Jenkins, Brewer, and Buckner. I doubt it will lay off even one of them.

Nor are these activists going to change what they write about and what they say. Any attempt to induce them in a less partisan, less woke direction would be met with howls that the Post is violating “journalistic integrity.”

There’s no reason to believe that Lewis would stand up to that kind of attack. Indeed, there’s little reason to think he would put himself in a position to face it.

In fact, at the same meeting in which he told the truth about the Post’s woes, he was cowed by whining from staff about alleged lack of diversity at the paper. Responding to complaints that the top four positions at the Post are now held by white men, Lewis said, “I’ve got to do better.” (The aforementioned Brewer, Buckner and Blackistone are black. Buckner and Jenkins are female, as are Chelsea Janes, the Post’s lead baseball writer, Ava Wallace who covers the Washington Wizards, and Nicki Jhabvala who covers the Washington Commanders.)

This is not someone who is going to reverse the Post’s descent into rank partisanship.

It’s also worth noting, as Jonathan Turley does, that the Post’s final step down that road occurred when Donald Trump emerged on the political stage. It was then, says Turley, that “suddenly, I found editors [who] would slow walk copy, contest every line of your column, and make unfounded claims.” In the meantime, he adds “they were increasingly running unsupported legal columns and even false statements from authors on the left.” And “when confronted about columnists with demonstrably false statements, the Post simply shrugged.”

There’s something like a 50 percent chance that Trump will be elected president again. Does anyone imagine that the Post will provide calm, objective reporting in a second Trump term? I don’t. I expect an even more shrill and dishonest offensive against the president than we witnessed the last time.

But even if Trump loses, the Post won’t reform. Its hyper-partisan reporters will continue on their current path.

Whether it’s the Post, the New York Times, or any major news outlet, reporters are the tail that wags the dog. If many fewer people are “reading their stuff,” that’s the price that must be paid in the name of fighting the “deplorables,” including the ones who used to be their readers.