Revenge of the Brits

Why have the British come for America’s media? Not only is Emma Tucker shaking things up, to howls of indignation, at The Wall Street Journal, but Mark Thompson is running the show at CNN, John Micklethwait at Bloomberg News, Keith Poole at The New York Post, and Daisy Veerasingham at the Associated Press. None of these appointments, however, caused the kind of grief that we are now witnessing at The Washington Post, where the British CEO, Will Lewis, recently announced the appointment of a longtime Fleet Street hack, Rob Winnett, as the paper’s new editor.

The British media invasion is causing considerable consternation—see, for example, the Post ’s lengthy exposé about its own incoming editor, detailing Winnett’s alleged connections with the shadier figures of the U.K. press world when he was a reporter at The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. Putting aside the accusations, the tenor of the investigation is melancholic: Is the newspaper of Watergate fame really about to import the discredited morals of Fleet Street? Do its owners not understand the constitutional importance of the newspaper’s endeavor? The same air of dismay has run through much American reporting since Winnett’s appointment, focusing on the “rough and tumble” nature of the Brits lately arrived in the metropole, with their backward ways, as if they resembled Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. It was one thing having the late Christopher Hitchens louchely lecturing America on how to run the imperium, but to have Brits actually in charge, bringing their standards and their culture—intolerable.

The fact that Lewis and Tucker both stand accused of insulting their staff by not being adulatory enough is an indication of the culture clash at work beneath—and it raises the question of whether the two very different journalistic traditions’s staff by informing the newsroom that the paper had lost half its audience since 2020 and . They replied, . I can imagine Lewis biting down hard on his tongue at this point, the instincts of a lifetime in British newspapers hurtling to the surface. When Tucker unveiled plans to cut eight jobs, meanwhile, her staff by posting scores of brightly colored Post-it Notes on her office wall.