WashPost Put Dr. Heather Cox Richardson’s Face On It, Then Erased Her Name

You don’t erase a woman this visible by mistake; you do it because her clarity costs you something.

I’m not gonna pretend I came to this Washington Post piece as some neutral observer in a lab coat. I’m a fan of Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, I read her most nights like folks used to read the evening paper, and when I opened that story and saw her face centered in the illustration but not a single mention of her name in the copy, my chest got hot. I’m not gonna pretend it didn’t hit the same sore spot I carry from childhood, that feeling of opening a history book and realizing the people who look like me either show up as a problem to be solved or not at all. To use a historian’s image, one of the best in her field, and then quietly erase her from the narrative about “Democrats’ digital media army” is not just sloppy, it is symbolic in a way Black readers know in our bones.

I’m not gonna pretend this is my first rodeo with this paper either. I am still mad about how they eased out the last Black female columnist, Karen Attiah, who had the nerve to stand up to Charlie Kirk and his little outrage machine, like her job was to be pleasant, not principled. When you have that memory in your body, it is hard to see them crop in Heather’s face, cash in on her credibility, and then act like she is just another influencer balloon in the background. So take this for what it’s worth.

The headline does a lot of work before you read a single sentence. “How Democrats are building their own digital media army” treats this whole ecosystem as a party operation, not a bunch of independent people who built trust one email, one livestream, one rent-stress night at a time. “Army” turns creators into soldiers taking orders, which is convenient if you’re a legacy outlet that wants to believe any serious audience that drifts away from you must have been captured by partisan militants, not persuaded by better storytelling and clearer history.

Then you hit that opening illustration, and the message gets louder. The follower counts float over each face like little currency symbols, as if the only thing that matters about these folks is how many bodies they can move on command. MeidasTouch in their awards-show suits, HCR centered with a calm, unadorned headshot, the podcasters smiling like a Netflix key art where every bubble says “these are assets in the Democratic arsenal,” not thinkers in their own right. And the cruel joke is right there in the layout: Dr. Richardson’s image is literally framed as part of the arsenal, but her name and work are treated like they can be cut from the story without cost.

If you read the piece like a police report instead of a vibes essay, the pattern in who gets named is loud. We meet State Rep. James Talarico in Texas, Gavin Newsom doing a 45-minute influencer Q&A, and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani “briefing creators” before his victory speech. We’re told former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper kicked off his Senate run with Brian Tyler Cohen, and that Sen. Mark Kelly went on Substack Live to talk gun violence after “right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was fatally shot.” Jennifer Welch from I’ve Had It gets a clean pull quote about “a shift” in Democrats’ media habits as she and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan roast politicians for being “too rehearsed and cautious.” CJ Pearson pops in to sneer that Democrats are trying to “copy our homework.”

Then we get a whole mini-movie of Talarico’s launch day: Andrew Mamo lining up Mike Nellis with his 1.3 million Substack subscribers, Chris Matthews and Katie Phang appearing courtesy of the MeidasTouch Network, Scott Dworkin queued up as the “easy peasy” stop whose job is to “rally the troops with the base.” We’re told explicitly that these creators offer “softball questions and fundraising support,” that Nellis plugs the website, that Phang calls Talarico a “friend” and compares his launch video to Abraham Lincoln, that Matthews declares himself a fan. Substack’s Catherine Valentine gets quoted explaining how valuable this audience is to campaigns. By the time we get to Graham Platner in Maine, we are watching a Democratic Senate candidate show video of his bare chest on Pod Save America to explain a tattoo that resembles a Nazi SS emblem as something he got “unknowingly during a drunken night as a Marine,” an explanation the interviewer accepts “without skepticism.”

All of that detail, all of those names, all of those carefully chosen quotes, and somehow there is not a single sentence for the one person in the illustration who sits on top of the entire ecosystem in raw audience and moral authority: Dr. Heather Cox Richardson. They can spell “Zohran Mamdani” and “Totenkopf,” they can walk us frame by frame through the redemption arc of a white candidate’s bad tattoo, but the historian whose nightly letters have taught millions how authoritarianism works is reduced to stock art in their “digital media army” story. That is not an innocent oversight; that is the kind of edit you make when you are comfortable platforming influence, but nervous about naming the woman whose whole project is teaching people to see power clearly.

I’ve watched this up close in my own family, where the woman with the degree is the one taking notes while the men without who barely read the assignment gets treated like the expert. You see it when a generation of schoolbooks turned Ida B. Wells into a footnote, if they mentioned her at all, while white male editors were remembered as brave defenders of the press. You see it when Anna Julia Cooper, who wrote about race and gender before most of these folks’ granddaddies were born, gets quoted without credit in syllabi that still center the same three male theorists. You see it when Fannie Lou Hamer’s “sick and tired” is turned into a slogan while the men who ignored her at the 1964 convention keep their full titles and marble busts. And you see it right here, when a billionaire newspaper is happy to use Dr. Heather Cox Richardson as the face of “democracy storytelling,” then hands the mic and the narrative agency to the men around her as if she is the backdrop, not the standard.

I’m going to say this plain: I don’t have receipts for what happened in that newsroom, but we gon’ go there anyway and say the quiet part out loud. A piece like this doesn’t run with Heather’s face dead center in the art and zero mention of her name in the copy without somebody up the chain signing off. You can almost hear the first draft: her work quoted as the backbone of this whole “democracy storytelling” wave, then somebody in a glass office asking, “Do we really want to foreground the woman who calls Trump an authoritarian while our owner is out here shaking hands in billionaire circles?” That’s the part nobody writes in the stylebook: when a historian is too clear about fascism, she stops being “color” for a lifestyle piece and starts being a liability for people who need good relationships with the very power she’s warning us about.

So yeah, I’m speculating that Jeff Bezos’s shadow is in the room even if he never touched a Word doc. Not some cartoon version where he’s barking orders, but the softer kind of pressure where everyone already knows what might make the boss nervous: an outspoken woman scholar, throwing daily elbows at Trumpism, getting positioned in their own pages as the lodestar of a pro-democracy movement they can’t fully control. I can imagine an editor looking at her name in the draft and sounding exactly like a Black comedian doing his best tight-throated white dude impression murmur, “This tilts too hard against Trump, too hard against billionaires, too hard toward one very specific moral center.” Meanwhile, the reporters still get their human-interest arc, the paper still gets to look hip to digital politics, and the only cost is erasing the one person in that illustration who treats history like a warning siren instead of a brand. Take that for what it’s worth.

Scroll down past the Lockheed Martin ads and the plastics ads, and the real story is in the comments. The very first voice, LolaSLola, doesn’t mince words: “Heather Cox Richardson’s picture, but nothing about her.” She keeps going, reminding the Post that “she’s an historian who puts a more historically relevant approach to her podcasts and ‘letters’ for all of us” and that “she’s a former republican. She comes at us with facts.” A few lines down, Quepos says what you were probably thinking yourself: “I double checked. Not a mention of Heather Cox Richardson in the article? Big oversight.”

Then the chorus builds. One reader flat-out testifies, “Heather Cox Richardson is the smartest communicator. She knows US history and provides great context. We need 100 more HCRs.” Another says, “I read Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter every day, before I read WaPo or the NY Times… her work is historically accurate and she nails the GOP with facts, not rhetoric. Thanks to Dr. Richardson for her hard work.” Lock 7 calls the omission exactly what it is: “a material omission – she is required reading… I don’t see how the Post could have omitted discussion of her in this article.” These folks aren’t random stans; they’re the core audience the Post is supposedly analyzing, telling the paper, in real time, who actually anchors this “digital media army.”

And some readers go straight at the journalists by name. “Dylan and Sarah, your reporting on here is abysmal,” one comment starts. “If you are not going to report or write about someone correctly… DO NOT include their picture! It’s beyond misleading.” That same reader insists HCR “cannot be regulated to being some kind of an ‘influencer’,” and reminds them she is “a highly educated historian and professor of history at Boston College” whose daily letter ties “our country’s history and its ties to our politics today in a clear-eyed manner.” That’s not nitpicking ya’ll that’s the audience accusing a legacy outlet of downgrading a scholar to set dressing.

Now put that next to the little AI box at the bottom, which serenely concludes, “The comments reflect a mixed reception to the Democratic Party’s engagement with digital media influencers,” and talks about “a call for more diverse voices and a recognition of the role of independent media.” Not a word about the anger at Heather’s erasure. Not a word about readers calling out corporate ownership or defending a woman historian’s authority. Even the machine has learned the house style: sand off the rage, file down the receipts, and pretend the loudest thing in the room is just “mixed reception.”

I’m not gonna pretend this is just about one sloppy edit in one Sunday feature. I’m not gonna pretend that turning a historian into a prop, cropping in Dr. Heather Cox Richardson’s face and cutting her name, is anything other than the same old playbook that wrote Ida, Anna, Fannie, and half my aunties out of the story until the people forced their way back in. I’m not gonna pretend I don’t remember what it looked like when Karen Attiah and other Black women at that paper found the edge of how much truth an institution like this will tolerate before it tightens the leash.

To any editors or Post staff who wander over here on a coffee break: we see you, we see the way you borrow the work and mute the woman, how you wrap yourselves in “Democracy Dies in Darkness” while dimming the lights on the people doing the clearest teaching about how democracies actually die.

So here’s my ask, to whoever made it this far: keep reading Heather, keep reading the women and the Black writers and the independents who don’t have a billionaire smoothing their rough edges for donor comfort, and the next time you see a legacy outlet borrowing their faces but not their names, borrowing their language but not their courage, don’t talk yourself into thinking it’s nothing; call it what it is, and then decide whose story you’re going to fund with your clicks, your dollars, and your attention. Take that for what it’s worth.

If you’ve felt even a flicker of what I’m naming here, this is where I ask you to put some skin in the game. Right now this little indie operation is sitting at 89 paid subscribers. I want to thank all of you who have contributed especially those that stepped in mass in the past several days.

When we hit 100, Substack slaps a tiny “Bestseller” badge on XVOA, and I promise you that is not about ego; it’s a wedge in the algorithm, one more way to shove work like this into the feeds of people who will never see themselves in a billionaire’s paper.

Upgrading to paid is a concrete way of saying you want more of this kind of truth-telling in the world and more room for Black voices that don’t have a corporate chaperone. Please don’t let this just be another moment of silent rage; let it change where you point your attention, your clicks, and, if you’re able, your dollars.