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.