structural:expansion, linguistic:translation
20th century

In 1933, financier Eugene Meyer bought the bankrupt Post, and assured the public that neither he nor the newspaper would be beholden to any political party. But as a leading Republican who had been appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve by Herbert Hoover in 1930, his opposition to Roosevelt 's New Deal colored the paper's editorials and news coverage, including editorializing news stories written by Meyer under a pseudonym. His wife Agnes Ernst Meyer was a journalist from the other end of the spectrum politically. The Post ran many of her pieces including tributes to her personal friends John Dewey and Saul Alinsky.

In 1946, Meyer was appointed head of World Bank, and he named his son-in-law Phil Graham to succeed him as Post publisher. The post-war years saw the developing friendship of Phil and Kay Graham with the Kennedys, the Bradlees and the rest of the " Georgetown Set", including many Harvard University alumni that would color the Post's political orientation. Kay Graham's most memorable Georgetown soirée guest list included British diplomat and communist spy Donald Maclean.

The Post is credited with coining the term " McCarthyism " in a 1950 editorial cartoon by Herbert Block. Depicting buckets of tar, it made fun of Sen. Joseph McCarthy 's "tarring" tactics, i.e., smear campaigns and character assassination against those targeted by his accusations. Sen. McCarthy was attempting to do for the Senate what the House Un-American Activities Committee had been doing for years—investigating Soviet espionage in America. The HUAC made Richard Nixon nationally known for his role in the Hiss / Chambers case that exposed communist spying in the State Department. The committee had evolved from the McCormack - Dickstein Committee of the 1930s.

Phil Graham's friendship with John F. Kennedy remained strong until their deaths in 1963. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reportedly told the new President Lyndon B. Johnson, "I don't have much influence with the Post because I frankly don't read it. I view it like the Daily Worker."

Ben Bradlee became the editor-in-chief in 1968, and Kay Graham officially became the publisher in 1969, paving the way for the aggressive reporting of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals. The Post strengthened public opposition to the Vietnam War in 1971 when it published the Pentagon Papers. In the mid-1970s, some conservatives referred to the Post as " Pravda on the Potomac " because of its perceived left-wing bias in both reporting and editorials. Since then, the appellation has been used by both liberal and conservative critics of the newspaper.