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The Murder of The Washington Post

As a news and politics junkie, I read the Washington Post for decades and recall the crucial role the newspaper played in exploding the Watergate scandal which ultimately ended in the resignation of a horrible president who thought himself above the law. Fast forward fifty plus years and when the nation is faced with another horrible president who views himself above the law and who engages in misdeeds that would have made even Nixon blush, we see the Post being destroyed by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, who is making a mockery of the paper's "Democracy dies in darkness" meme and who has seemingly sold his soul to Donald Trump, a/k/a the Felon, a would be dictator. When Bezos first swore fealty to to the Felon and gutted the paper's editorial board hundreds of thousands of subscribers, including myself, canceled their subscriptions. Now, with mass layoffs of journalists and every indication that serious journalism at the Post is dead - much like CBS News (which I no longer watch) has been destroyed by another billionaire willing to prostitute himself to the Felon - one can expect subscriptions to plummet further. What has happened to both news organizations underscores the threat that today's billionaire class, most of who have less than zero sense of noblesse oblige, pose to both democracy in America and to the wellbeing of everyday citizens.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the destruction of the Post and the growing threat posed by billionaires:

We’re witnessing a murder.  Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.

Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job.

What’s happening to the Post is a public tragedy, but for me, it is also very personal. . . . . Which is to say: The Washington Post feels like a part of my family’s DNA, imprinted on our earliest memories, memorialized among clippings of our hair and other, more traditional, recollections (first diaper blowout, first word).

As a kid growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, I can’t remember a time when the Post was not, somehow, woven through the fabric of my life. I cut out Sports-section photos of the Redskins coach Joe Gibbs and the quarterback Mark Rypien to plaster on the walls of my childhood bedroom the year my dad taught me how to watch football.

The Post was also how I fell in love with journalism. Every newspaper lover has the section they read first—Sports, Comics, Metro—and mine was Style. The section, which debuted in 1969, was like nothing that had come before it, or what has come since: a newspaper that gave its writers the time and space and freedom and voice to produce narrative long-form journalism that was must-read, holding its own against the New Journalism magazine greats of the era. And for me, it was a chance to commune with giants—to read people such as Libby Copeland, Robin Givhan, Paul Hendrickson, Sally Quinn, David Von Drehle, Gene Weingarten, Marjorie Williams—and puzzle over how they’d done it.

Then, in 2017, I arrived at the Post as a reporter to cover the Trump White House, and I stayed for eight magical years. I had planned to stay forever. So what is happening at the Post right now—what has been happening there for a while—is personal. But it is also so much larger than me or any single person.

The least cynical explanation is that Bezos simply isn’t paying attention. Maybe—like so many of us initially—he was charmed by Lewis’s British accent and studied loucheness that mask an emperor whose bespoke threads are no clothes at all. Or maybe, as many of us who deeply love the Post fear, the decimation is the plan.

The Post journalists I know have shown a genuine willingness—even an eagerness—to evolve, a spirit of creativity and innovation at a time of transformation in the media. But its executives seem not to know where to lead it. Among the many failures here—of leadership, management, business, imagination, courage—the actual journalism stands strong.

Journalism is—has always been—a tough industry. But I watched firsthand as Bezos, Lewis, and company spoke in turgid corporate-ese (“Fix it, build it, scale it”) and failed to launch—or even attempt to launch—initiatives that might achieve their grandiose visions. They began 2025 by unveiling the “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of jumping from about 2.5 million subscribers to 200 million paying users, despite having ended the previous year hemorrhaging tens of thousands of their existing subscribers, all while blaming the journalists for the paper’s travails.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to the Post’s financial woes, or a successful business model for a local paper that is also the nation’s hometown paper. But I can tell you what will be lost if these two men—who don’t seem to understand what the Post was, what it still is, and what it could be—continue to treat it like a distressed asset or a bargaining chip with a president who, ultimately, does not respect bargaining supplicants.

Watergate started as a local story. Marty Weil—who is now in his 61st year at the Post—was subbing as a night editor on the Metro desk when he heard five words crackle across the police scanner: “Doors open at the Watergate.” Al Lewis, the dayside police-beat reporter, wrote the first story that appeared on the June 18, 1972, front page—“5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here.”  . . . . An arresting officer allowed him to glimpse the address book of one of the Watergate burglars, containing a scribbled entry, “H Hunt. WH,” and a number that went straight to the White House.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported for duty that Sunday, and they soon took over. The story went national, toppling a presidency and inspiring generations of journalists. But it was also quintessential Post reporting—relentlessly and fearlessly pursuing the truth and holding power to account in a collaborative effort across the newsroom.

Watergate was hardly the last time that the paper turned coverage of local events into national news. The Post also reported on the September 11 attacks, which killed 125 people at the Pentagon and all 64 people aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed; the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, which left 32 professors and students dead and dozens more injured; and the January 6 riot at the Capitol and its aftermath. This past year, the Post, with expert reporters at nearly every major federal agency, delivered unsurpassed accounts of the DOGE-ing of the federal government. . . . Whatever bar you set for success—exposing corruption, changing lives, moving readers to tears and to action, bringing joy and understanding to the community it serves, winning prizes—the Post has always cleared it.

Today’s layoffs provide a whiff of the latest alleged strategy: an almost-exclusive focus on politics and national-security coverage, though even that explanation defies credulity, as the growing list of those laid off includes some of the nation’s finest political and international reporters and editors. . . . To the extent that a plan exists, it seems to be to transform the Post into a facsimile of Politico.

But general-interest publications can be profitable. The New York Times has shown there is money to be made by diversifying, expanding, experimenting, offering something for everyone. (News! Audio! Games! Cooking! Video! Long-form!) The publication you’re reading now is profitable, and has nearly 1.5 million subscribers. Other specialty publications, such as Axios and Punchbowl News, have succeeded by tripling down on the needs and interests of their core audience. The Post, instead, is abandoning its current audience in search of one that may not exist.

What Bezos, Lewis, and their jargon-loving underlings also fail to understand is that the paper’s coverage of Washington will be neither as vivid nor as authoritative without the contributions of journalists in bureaus around the world. Those correspondents risk their life to help readers understand how, say, the United States deposing a leader in Venezuela may have consequences for citizens living in Ohio. Coverage of the White House and Congress is enhanced by a well-sourced Metro team and gimlet-eyed narrators in Style.

Nearly all media outlets are struggling to reinvent themselves. But the Post should have been better equipped than most to meet the moment. It has a great reputation, great talent, and great positioning to cover local stories for a large and highly educated audience willing to pay for news, and to serve a broader national audience eager for deep political and accountability reporting.

During President Trump’s first term, the then–executive editor, Marty Baron, green-lighted a graphic-nonfiction version of the Mueller Report and later turned it into a book. And when Congress declined to create a September 11–style commission to investigate the January 6 attacks, the Post decided that it would do what Congress would not: Without subpoena power, more than 100 journalists from across the newsroom produced a 38,000-word investigative series, “The Attack,” offering the definitive story of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. (It was part of the package that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.)

The Post was a place where everyone could be, and was, part of the same shared mission; we wore Democracy Dies in Darkness hoodies to work, blue-and-white WP beanies in the winter. . . . Although many talented and hardworking people have left the paper in recent years, many talented and hardworking people have chosen to remain, and others have joined. The Post is still one of the best places to do important work. Journalists there turned down lucrative buyouts or other compelling offers to stay and fight for a place they love because they believe in the paper and the mission. . . . But each departure—whether by choice or buyout or, now, deliberate gutting—represents not just an individual loss but the erasure of years of institutional memory.

[A]s I watch the deliberate dismantling of the paper of the Graham family, of Woodward and Bernstein, of Marty Baron, of so many of my best friends, my grief is still visceral, my anger still raw.

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A Wake-up Call for White Americans

As noted in previous post, the Felon's regime and MAGA in general are waging war against empathy as they push their ugly agenda. Unfortunately, too many Americans already lack empathy for others and look the other when others are mistreated and abused based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin.  The mindset is that so long as racist and abusive policies do not directly impact them, these people close their eyes to injustice and even violence. Indeed, those pushing ugly policies rely on this largely white segment of American society ignoring things that they would never tolerate if they themselves were the targets of cruelty and mistreatment.  As a piece at Salon sets out, this blindness to the suffering of  others is foolish because as events in Minneapolis have made clear, white skin and so-called white privilege will not protect you from the brutality and misogyny of the Felon's regime.  This is a reality long known by blacks, Hispanics and other demographics that have faced discrimination and abuse.  Here are article highlights:

None of what we have seen over the past few weeks — not the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of federal officers, the seizure of children by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, the callous disregard of civil rights and liberties from an increasingly authoritarian administration — is supposed to be happening in America. But it is. 

American citizens are being arrested and brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights — recording ICE, standing nearby or simply being the “wrong” color in the wrong place. The Trump administration has labeled these Americans “domestic terrorists,” claiming they posed existential threats to heavily armed federal agents, despite clear video evidence to the contrary. Immigrants are hiding, afraid to go outside. Entire neighborhoods and communities are under siege. Even though it’s only January, at least eight people have died from their encounters with ICE.

The cognitive dissonance is dizzying. Disorientation is one of the authoritarian leader’s most powerful weapons.

Hours after Pretti was killed on Jan. 24, hundreds of people protested near the site in Minneapolis where he died. There, an older white woman told a reporter that “the government is not supposed to be doing these horrible things to the American people. It is unbelievable. This is something like Nazi Germany or Russia.”

Like many other white Americans, and too many Black and brown Americans, she seemed willfully ignorant of her own country’s history, which includes genocide and land theft against First Nations; white-on-Black chattel slavery; Jim and Jane Crow; the Black Codes; the Red Scare; violent social and political repression of LGBTQ Americans; the Palmer Raids; mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, to name just a few examples.

And then there is the language. When many protesters insist that “regular people,” “good people” and “citizens” should not be treated this way, what they often mean — consciously or not — is middle- and upper-class white people like themselves.

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley recently explained why the killings of middle-class white people like Good and Pettri by ICE and Border Patrol have provoked such widespread outrage among white Americans and “even the most seasoned organizers.”

“[Good] was a white woman and a mother — two things you’re not supposed to be when armed agents of the state put you in a body bag,” Kelley wrote. . . . . White racial innocence, in its various forms, is exhausting for those of us on the other side of the color line. But after allowing myself a moment of exasperation with the woman on the television, I turned to the lessons of history.

The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement understood that images of those who were often referred to as “respectable white people” being beaten, arrested and even killed would move white moderates — and, crucially, white elites — to oppose Jim and Jane Crow apartheid.

“Their simple but straightforward calculation was that Black suffering wasn’t new,” journalist Thomas Ricks wrote in “Waging a Good War,” “but white suffering was, especially when it was inflicted by Mississippi officials on middle-class college students from the North. And so [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] decided, John Lewis wrote, to bring ‘an army of Northern college students into Mississippi….If white America would not respond to the deaths of our people, the thinking went, maybe it would react to the deaths of its own children.’”

Now, 60 years later, similar images of “respectable white people” being abused by police and other law enforcement are having a powerful impact on public opinion.

Polls released in the aftermath of Good and Pretti’s killings show that a majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump’s immigration policies. According to a YouGov poll, more Americans (46%) want to abolish ICE than support it (41%). A small but growing number of Republicans also want ICE abolished or reformed with far stricter oversight.

The struggle for America’s multiracial democracy needs — and has always needed — everyday white people of conscience who are prepared to make good trouble.

If I could talk to the older white woman I saw being interviewed — who appears to be what my grandmother and other elders would describe as “good white people” — I would tell her that she was in love with a country that never really existed but that she truly thought was real. Now is the time for her and others like her to broaden their lenses and accept our new reality. What is happening now to white people like her has been the norm for Black, brown and other marginalized communities throughout American history. This is the moment for us to lean into solidarity — to learn from our shared history of struggling for a better society and democracy on both sides of the color line. 

A white freedom rider — a real American hero, though he would never use that language — once told me that he decided to join the Civil Rights Movement after asking himself a basic question: What type of white person do I want to be? More importantly, what type of human being do I want to be? . . . .As Trump’s authoritarian vise continues to tighten, Americans on both sides of the color line will be forced to answer that question.

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