Why Can't the Washington Post Learn to Think?

The economics behind why the New York Times is smarter than the Washington Post.

One difference between the New York Times and the Washington Post is that the NYT employs smarter reporters and editors. Consider this article on a new British social science study in today’s WP:

Which accents face the worst stereotypes? A U.K. study has some surprises.

British accents can vary hugely — and face positive or negative stereotypes. …

The peer-reviewed study, published in Frontiers of Communication on Friday, found that regional accents — that is, accents other than RP [Received Pronunciation] — were perceived as more likely to be working-class and associated with criminal behavior. The Liverpool accent was the one most associated with criminal behavior, followed by the cockney accent of East London (previously associated with the likes of David and Victoria Beckham) and the accents of Bradford and Newcastle (the latter made famous by Geordie Shore [a Jersey Shore-like TV show).

Those with the RP accent, meanwhile, were typically perceived as having the highest status and being the least likely to commit crimes — with the exception of sexual assault, where they were rated among the most likely to commit the offense.

Guys with Hugh Grant’s Old Boy accent are probably also more likely to be caught in insider trading and other financial scandals.

But here are some terms not mentioned anywhere in the Post’s write-up of new research on accent prejudices in the UK:

And here’s the paywall. The rest of my post is 625 words.

George Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion
My Fair Lady
Professor Henry Higgins
Eliza Doolittle

Shaw was an inveterate progressive social reformer and had strong views on projects like language reform or spelling reform, which many people were highly interested in a century ago but have now largely vanished from the English-speaking world.

This verbal class distinction by now should be antique.
If you spoke as she does, sir,
Instead of the way you do,
Why, you might be selling flowers, too.
An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
The moment he talks he makes some other
Englishman despise him.
One common language I'm afraid we'll never get.
Oh, why can't the English learn to set
A good example to people whose
English is painful to your ears?
The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears.
There even are places where English completely
Disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks have taught their
Greek. In France every Frenchman knows
His language from "A" to "Zed"
The French never care what they do, actually,
As long as they pronounce it properly.
Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.
And Hebrews learn it backwards,
Which is absolutely frightening.
But use proper English you're regarded as a freak.
Why can't the English,
Why can't the English learn to speak?

If the NYT wrote up this study, there would be, I’d guess, a 95% chance that the Times’ article would mention at least one reference to the famous play/musical/film. And its headline might focus less on “surprises” than on continuity of stereotypes since Henry Higgins’ day.

Why? Because the NYT tends to employ older, better paid, and more knowledgeable writers and editors.

And that’s due to revenue. In the digital age, economies of scale matter a lot: the NYT has 11 million paying subscribers while the Post had 2.5 million before owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to not have his newspaper endorse Kamala, which led to 0.25 million subscribers canceling. Perhaps Trump Derangement Syndrome will set in again and bring back some of the Post’s subscribers, but at the moment, Democrats seem pretty checked out of politics.

(How come? I suspect the big flow of nonwhite votes to Trump in 2024 appears to have befuddled Dems: if Trump had won by getting more whites to vote for him, that would have just proven that Trump is racist and thus illegitimate. But since the big change since 2020 was in various nonwhite groups moving toward Trump, that leaves Democrats ideologically stumped. Their worldview is basically: whites are Bad, especially whites who like Trump, while nonwhites are Good. But now in the rubber match of Trump’s career, nonwhites seem to have grown to like Trump a surprising amount. Does Not Compute.)

By the way, it’s striking how much less Americans have in the way of class accents than do the English. My impression is that the British intentionally socially constructed their system of national boarding schools (Eton, Harrow, etc.) to eliminate regional elite accents in order to unify the ruling class nationally. (Received Pronunciation is also intended to facilitate oral communication: it encourages rapid but lucid speech, ideal for speaking in Parliament or on the BBC.)

In contrast, here’s an American aristocrat, Theodore Roosevelt V, speaking:

To my not very sophisticated ears, that sounds like an appealing accent. But I wouldn’t immediately notice that it’s redolent of a famous old money and public service pedigree. (Here’s his great-great-grandfather recorded on a wax cylinder during his Bull Moose campaign in 1912.)

If TR V is representative, the American upper class may have the best of both worlds at present: they speak well, but not so distinctively that the moment they talk they make some other American despise them.