Slings and arrows will undoubtedly fly on this admission, but I have read the Washington Post for a very long time, and look forward to its daily digest. It’s not that I think the WaPo is somehow absent the usual leftward media bias — quite the opposite — but it’s still the house paper of the Beltway. If one wants to cover and analyze the federal government and its policies and peccadilloes, one needs to read its biggest media outlet.

Of course, one should add to that all sorts of other resources, such as the Washington Examiner, Washington Free Beacon, Roll Call, The Hill, and plenty of others. Bubbles are corrosive in our business.

That, however, brings us to my point today. The WaPo daily digest has been a pretty good indicator of the priority for coverage of the overall paper, and especially revealing of editorial direction of the paper. With the stunning report on inflation in yesterday’s Consumer Price Index report and the Producer Price Index report the day before, I expected to see a lot of focus on the economy. The Post has some very good economic reporters, such as Heather Long and David Lynch, among others. Even if their analysis contrasted with mine, I wanted to see what they had to say about inflation.

Instead, it’s almost as if none of those reports had been published at all. The only mention of inflation in their daily digest was this sales pitch for a Treasury bond:

• Get inflation-proof bonds paying 9.62 percent while there is still time

That is literally the only mention of inflation in the entire WaPo digest. So what did the digest focus on? Promoting the January 6 committee’s midterm PR stunt yesterday and Trump Trump Trump:

• House Jan. 6 committee votes to subpoena Trump in finale surprise
• Secret Service knew of Capitol threat more than a week before Jan. 6
• Jan. 6 panel scrutinizes Trump’s post-election military orders
• Supreme Court rejects Trump request on Mar-a-Lago documents
• Key Mar-a-Lago witness said to be former White House employee
• A criminal referral that doesn’t name Trump would be criminal
• 5 takeaways from the latest Jan. 6 hearing
• The Jan. 6 committee preaches to the choir

The final three links are opinion pieces, by the way, which the digest includes while excluding any news about the inflation that continues to hammer American consumers. (It’s also two more links than the war in Ukraine gets in today’s digest, by the way.) The latter piece by Gary Abernathy is worth reading, as it not only castigates this committee as a sheer partisan-politics mechanism but also implicitly indicts the media for playing along with breathless coverage of nothing much at all:

There are few things as irritating as a preacher who just won’t end his sermon until someone, anyone, finally steps forward to confess and repent, regardless of how far most minds long ago drifted off to thoughts of football, afternoon naps and Sunday dinner.

That’s what the tedious Jan. 6 committee feels like, with committee members determined to convince everyone, no matter how tired, uninterested or skeptical, that former president Donald Trump is evil incarnate, that his followers are dangerously wayward enablers, and that renouncing them both is the only road to salvation. Can we get an amen?

Most of Thursday’s presentation was a monotonous rehash of what committee members apparently felt was their most damning and convincing details, all leading to the clear political stunt of issuing a subpoena for Trump, which, if it were a serious move, would have been done at the beginning of the hearings, not the end. As law professor Jonathan Turley was quick to point out, the move comes quite late in the game, and Trump will likely never be forced to comply. …

[W]e knew those truths on Jan. 6, 2021. No congressional committee was needed to reveal them. I doubt the hearings have persuaded very many people to accept them who previously did not. So now that the preacher seems finally out of breath, what was the point of it all?

The point of it all was to create a distraction campaign. The committee wants to make the midterms a referendum on Donald Trump rather than the actual current president, Joe Biden. That distraction campaign has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams with the Post and its more-absurd-than-ever slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” at the top of each website page, in white text on a black banner just in case you miss the point.

If you’re concerned about the economy, inflation, or the job performance of the actual president, all the WaPo daily digest offers is darkness.

To conclude on that point, the digest today mentions Trump five times. Want to guess how many times it mentions Biden? Zero. Zilch. Nada, even while Biden is campaigning in California and commenting on the inflation report.

I suspect that this analysis might convince the Post to stop sending me the daily digest. If so, I’ll miss it, if only for its revelation about editorial direction and priorities. But increasingly, it’s becoming more and more irrelevant for any other purpose.