Nobody Asked for This Washington Post Podcast

Those are real video titles from Make It Make Sense, the Washington Post opinion section’s new flagship podcast, which the paper officially launched on Monday, a day after the media newsletter Status reported that the section had spent $80,000 (!) building out a new podcast studio. The show is hosted in rotation by opinion editor Adam O’Neal, deputy opinion editor James Hohmann, and columnists such as Carine Hajjar, Kate Andrews, Dominic Pino, and Jason Willick. Most of them are recent hires, part of the section’s hard pivot right under Bezos.

After more than 20 episodes since they started posting in late February (and 186 videos on YouTube), the show’s dedicated YouTube channel has … 515 subscribers. The launch trailer is on The Washington Post’s main YouTube channel, which has 2.85 million subscribers. It has 1,400 views. (These numbers are as of Wednesday afternoon and will probably have shifted by the time you read this.)

The new opinion section’s video push is failing publicly, and so are the other billionaire-funded prestige-media operations that share its model. The content is dull. The numbers are microscopic. And the men paying for it have been telling us all along that they don’t care. For all the talk of “the marketplace of ideas,” Make It Make Sense looks like yet another right-wing influence operation that exists solely because a billionaire is willing to subsidize it.