One of the most striking things about moving from a world of building things to a world of watching things is how much the incentives for honesty have changed. In the startup world, if you lie to yourself about your product, the market corrects you. You go out of business. But in local media, especially in a city like Seattle, there is no such correction. In fact, the incentives for the Seattle Times seem to point in the opposite direction. If you look at their editorial stance on things like the wealth tax and the income tax, they aren’t treating them as experiments to be measured, but as dogmas to be enforced. It’s a form of propaganda, though perhaps they’ve convinced themselves it’s just “community leadership.”
When you see a major newspaper pushing for an income tax in a state that has historically rejected it, you have to ask what they think they’re optimizing for. They certainly aren’t optimizing for economic growth. If you tax the people who are best at allocating capital, you get less capital allocation. This is obvious to anyone who has ever run a company, but it’s apparently invisible to the editorial board of a legacy newspaper. They seem to believe that the problem with Washington is that it isn’t enough like California, which is an odd thing to believe if you’ve looked at the data on where people and businesses are actually moving.
The most damaging part isn’t even the taxes, though; it’s the lack of accountability in the systems those taxes are meant to fund. Take the relationship between the teachers unions and student performance. If you look at the test results for Washington state students over the last few years, the trend is downward. If a startup’s core metric dropped every year while its costs went up, the board would fire the CEO. But in the world the Seattle Times advocates for, the solution is always more money and less measurement. They resist any form of accountability for the unions, even as the results for the students—the people the system is supposed to serve—continue to decay.
Why would a newspaper do this? It’s probably just the standard institutional capture. When your readership is a narrow demographic of political activists and public sector employees, you eventually become their PR firm. You stop being a way for the city to think and start being a way for the city’s power brokers to stay comfortable. The tragedy is that a city like Seattle needs a real newspaper more than most. It’s a city built on the idea that you can create the future through intelligence and hard work. But if the city’s main source of information is focused on protecting failing institutions and taxing the people who build new ones, it’s going to be very hard for that future to happen there.