#firings — Public Fediverse posts

https://www.europesays.com/people/134637/ Hegseth Firings of Generals Draw US Bipartisan Concern, Calls for Limits #a #and #as #Bipartisan #calls #concern #conflict #Congress #could #decision #DEFENSE #departures #Draw #drawing #during #exit #firings #for #Generals #Global #hegseth #high #in #is #Islam #lawmakers #leaders #level #Limits #making #Military #of #pentagon #period #pete #PeteHegseth #secretary #senior #the #Times #uncertainty #under #undermine #US #warn #wave

https://www.europesays.com/people/133292/ Hegseth has ‘undermined’ the US military, says Republican on Armed Services Committee #ChrisDonahue #DonBacon #DonaldTrump #firings #HouseArmedServicesCommittee #Iran #JohnPhelan #pentagon #PeteHegseth #RandyGeorge

“The #DeepState #firings have begun,” the [dumb-ass 🤬] source said, declining to give details on how many #jobs had been cut.

Sources had previously told CNN that #BillPulte, the #Trump personal pick to serve as #DNI in [a conveniently] “acting” capacity, was looking at cutting hundreds of jobs at the #ODNI. Last week, #BillPulte showed up to his new job a day early after asking for a list of EVERY employee in the office catching even creepy outgoing director #TulsiGabbard off-guard.

#Trump

“The #DeepState #firings have begun,” the [dumb-ass 🤬] source said, declining to give details on how many #jobs had been cut.

Sources had previously told CNN that #BillPulte, the #Trump personal pick to serve as #DNI in [a conveniently] “acting” capacity, was looking at cutting hundreds of jobs at the #ODNI. Last week, #BillPulte showed up to his new job a day early after asking for a list of EVERY employee in the office catching even creepy outgoing director #TulsiGabbard off-guard.

#Trump

“The #DeepState #firings have begun,” the [dumb-ass 🤬] source said, declining to give details on how many #jobs had been cut.

Sources had previously told CNN that #BillPulte, the #Trump personal pick to serve as #DNI in [a conveniently] “acting” capacity, was looking at cutting hundreds of jobs at the #ODNI. Last week, #BillPulte showed up to his new job a day early after asking for a list of EVERY employee in the office catching even creepy outgoing director #TulsiGabbard off-guard.

#Trump

“The #DeepState #firings have begun,” the [dumb-ass 🤬] source said, declining to give details on how many #jobs had been cut.

Sources had previously told CNN that #BillPulte, the #Trump personal pick to serve as #DNI in [a conveniently] “acting” capacity, was looking at cutting hundreds of jobs at the #ODNI. Last week, #BillPulte showed up to his new job a day early after asking for a list of EVERY employee in the office catching even creepy outgoing director #TulsiGabbard off-guard.

#Trump

“The #DeepState #firings have begun,” the [dumb-ass 🤬] source said, declining to give details on how many #jobs had been cut.

Sources had previously told CNN that #BillPulte, the #Trump personal pick to serve as #DNI in [a conveniently] “acting” capacity, was looking at cutting hundreds of jobs at the #ODNI. Last week, #BillPulte showed up to his new job a day early after asking for a list of EVERY employee in the office catching even creepy outgoing director #TulsiGabbard off-guard.

#Trump

… and there it is 🤬🤬🤬

Large Scale #Firings now underway at Office of Director of National Intelligence [ #ODNI ] under #Trump lickspittle zero experience just-some-dumbass schmuck #BillPulte, “source” says

#labor #law #FederalWorkers #CareerJobs #intelligence #espionage #NationalSecurity #LoyaltyTests #idiocracy #kakistocracy #authoritarianism #autocracy #dictatorship #fascism
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/22/politics/odni-firings-underway-bill-pulte?cid=ios_app

… and there it is 🤬🤬🤬

Large Scale #Firings now underway at Office of Director of National Intelligence [ #ODNI ] under #Trump lickspittle zero experience just-some-dumbass schmuck #BillPulte, “source” says

#labor #law #FederalWorkers #CareerJobs #intelligence #espionage #NationalSecurity #LoyaltyTests #idiocracy #kakistocracy #authoritarianism #autocracy #dictatorship #fascism
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/22/politics/odni-firings-underway-bill-pulte?cid=ios_app

… and there it is 🤬🤬🤬

Large Scale #Firings now underway at Office of Director of National Intelligence [ #ODNI ] under #Trump lickspittle zero experience just-some-dumbass schmuck #BillPulte, “source” says

#labor #law #FederalWorkers #CareerJobs #intelligence #espionage #NationalSecurity #LoyaltyTests #idiocracy #kakistocracy #authoritarianism #autocracy #dictatorship #fascism
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/22/politics/odni-firings-underway-bill-pulte?cid=ios_app

… and there it is 🤬🤬🤬

Large Scale #Firings now underway at Office of Director of National Intelligence [ #ODNI ] under #Trump lickspittle zero experience just-some-dumbass schmuck #BillPulte, “source” says

#labor #law #FederalWorkers #CareerJobs #intelligence #espionage #NationalSecurity #LoyaltyTests #idiocracy #kakistocracy #authoritarianism #autocracy #dictatorship #fascism
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/22/politics/odni-firings-underway-bill-pulte?cid=ios_app

… and there it is 🤬🤬🤬

Large Scale #Firings now underway at Office of Director of National Intelligence [ #ODNI ] under #Trump lickspittle zero experience just-some-dumbass schmuck #BillPulte, “source” says

#labor #law #FederalWorkers #CareerJobs #intelligence #espionage #NationalSecurity #LoyaltyTests #idiocracy #kakistocracy #authoritarianism #autocracy #dictatorship #fascism
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/22/politics/odni-firings-underway-bill-pulte?cid=ios_app

Amid ongoing #ForeignPolicy crises around the globe & as the #Trump admin fails to reach a deal to end the #war with #Iran, the #US #State Dept last week finalized the #firings of nearly 250 #diplomats in a brief, impersonal email.

#diplomacy #kakistocracy #idiocracy #geopolitics
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/politics/global-crises-state-department-cuts?cid=ios_app

Amid ongoing #ForeignPolicy crises around the globe & as the #Trump admin fails to reach a deal to end the #war with #Iran, the #US #State Dept last week finalized the #firings of nearly 250 #diplomats in a brief, impersonal email.

#diplomacy #kakistocracy #idiocracy #geopolitics
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/politics/global-crises-state-department-cuts?cid=ios_app

Amid ongoing #ForeignPolicy crises around the globe & as the #Trump admin fails to reach a deal to end the #war with #Iran, the #US #State Dept last week finalized the #firings of nearly 250 #diplomats in a brief, impersonal email.

#diplomacy #kakistocracy #idiocracy #geopolitics
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/politics/global-crises-state-department-cuts?cid=ios_app

Amid ongoing #ForeignPolicy crises around the globe & as the #Trump admin fails to reach a deal to end the #war with #Iran, the #US #State Dept last week finalized the #firings of nearly 250 #diplomats in a brief, impersonal email.

#diplomacy #kakistocracy #idiocracy #geopolitics
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/politics/global-crises-state-department-cuts?cid=ios_app

Amid ongoing #ForeignPolicy crises around the globe & as the #Trump admin fails to reach a deal to end the #war with #Iran, the #US #State Dept last week finalized the #firings of nearly 250 #diplomats in a brief, impersonal email.

#diplomacy #kakistocracy #idiocracy #geopolitics
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/politics/global-crises-state-department-cuts?cid=ios_app

https://www.europesays.com/people/59602/ ‘You Wonder If You Are Next’: Hegseth Staff Purges Rattle Pentagon #BIN #CQBrown #firings #general #HegsethStaff #pentagon #PeteHegseth #purges #SecretaryOfDefense

Disarray: Alarm inside #Pentagon after #Hegseth staff purges

Since #Trump’s first term, they have been viewed comfortingly as the “adults in the room,” a last line of defense against the impulsive whims of a president with access to the #nuclear codes.

After unprecedented wave of #firings that has been compared to #Stalin’s purges, Pentagon top brass no longer seem like such a reliable bulwark

https://www.europesays.com/uk/935086/

#dictatorship #DementiaDon #USAggression #USThreats #BoycottUSA #sociopaths

Disarray: Alarm inside #Pentagon after #Hegseth staff purges

Since #Trump’s first term, they have been viewed comfortingly as the “adults in the room,” a last line of defense against the impulsive whims of a president with access to the #nuclear codes.

After unprecedented wave of #firings that has been compared to #Stalin’s purges, Pentagon top brass no longer seem like such a reliable bulwark

https://www.europesays.com/uk/935086/

#dictatorship #DementiaDon #USAggression #USThreats #BoycottUSA #sociopaths

Disarray: Alarm inside #Pentagon after #Hegseth staff purges

Since #Trump’s first term, they have been viewed comfortingly as the “adults in the room,” a last line of defense against the impulsive whims of a president with access to the #nuclear codes.

After unprecedented wave of #firings that has been compared to #Stalin’s purges, Pentagon top brass no longer seem like such a reliable bulwark

https://www.europesays.com/uk/935086/

#dictatorship #DementiaDon #USAggression #USThreats #BoycottUSA #sociopaths

Disarray: Alarm inside #Pentagon after #Hegseth staff purges

Since #Trump’s first term, they have been viewed comfortingly as the “adults in the room,” a last line of defense against the impulsive whims of a president with access to the #nuclear codes.

After unprecedented wave of #firings that has been compared to #Stalin’s purges, Pentagon top brass no longer seem like such a reliable bulwark

https://www.europesays.com/uk/935086/

#dictatorship #DementiaDon #USAggression #USThreats #BoycottUSA #sociopaths

Disarray: Alarm inside #Pentagon after #Hegseth staff purges

Since #Trump’s first term, they have been viewed comfortingly as the “adults in the room,” a last line of defense against the impulsive whims of a president with access to the #nuclear codes.

After unprecedented wave of #firings that has been compared to #Stalin’s purges, Pentagon top brass no longer seem like such a reliable bulwark

https://www.europesays.com/uk/935086/

#dictatorship #DementiaDon #USAggression #USThreats #BoycottUSA #sociopaths

3 Down, 12 to Go

When Donald Trump began his second term in the White House, there were fifteen original heads of executive departments like State, Defense and Treasury. There were seven additional cabinet-rank officials. Of the fifteen, Trump has fired three.

Trump’s first term saw a revolving door of cabinet-level officials. A newcomer to the Washington bureaucracy, Trump took advice from Republican insiders and appointed several department heads who had some experience in government. They stupidly put their oath to uphold the law and Constitution ahead of their loyalty to Trump. The Donald was not going to make that mistake again.

The second time around Trump followed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 gameplan closely. That’s the plan he swore he had never heard of during the election campaign. The plan mapped the transition of the American government into an authoritarian regime managed for the benefit of the moneyed elite, the billionaire class. The plan dictated that Trump install loyalists in these positions. That he did, putting into positions of power a motely group of the least qualified people ever entrusted to run the government of the United States.

Trump did not fire the three cabinet officers because of their incompetence. He fired them because they made him look bad.

Noem No More

Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary, was the first Trump cabinet secretary to walk the plank. Noem previously served at the governor of South Dakota and a member of the House of Representatives. She did have some experience in cybersecurity and state disaster management, but nothing at the national level.

The Republican controlled Congress showered Noem with money designed to turn the agency onto a super federal police force dedicated primarily to the mass deportation of immigrants. The scale was extraordinary. The reconciliation funding alone was nearly nine times DHS’s FY2024 budget. The list of Noem’s abuses of authority is long and cases suing her and the department are pending in scores of lawsuits from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis, all cities which her hastily hired and poorly training agents invaded and attacked people indiscriminately. In Minneapolis, two American citizens were killed by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol, both agencies reporting to Noem.

Noem also had a taste for luxury travel. In 2025, the Coast Guard (under DHS) signed a $172 million contract for two long-range Gulfstream G700 jets, marketed as having the “most spacious cabin in the industry.” DHS said the purchase was for safety reasons, noting the existing jet Noem used was over 20 years old and beyond operational limits. The jets were intended for official travel by Noem, the deputy secretary, Coast Guard commandant, and other top DHS officials.

Noem had intended to purchase a Boeing 737 Max 8 for personal and official travel. The plane was originally leased by her and her aide/Corey Lewandowski for domestic trips, including high-profile deportation missions, and also for Cabinet-level travel. It was equipped with a queen-size bed, showers, a kitchen, four flat-screen TVs, and a cocktail bar. ICE had initially bought it before Noem’s ouster, but after she was fired the White House took control of the purchase. The administration decided to keep the jet and make it available to Melania Trump and other cabinet secretaries.

Many of these excesses would be caught by the department’s Inspector General. But Trump learned his lesson about the IGs during his first term. In January 2025, Trump terminated at least 17 IGs at once via email, citing “changing priorities”. These officials, meant to be independent watchdogs over federal agencies, were widely described as part of a “purge,” with many removals occurring without the required 30-day notice to Congress. 

None of that had much to do with Trump’s decision to fire Noem. Trump fired Noem, a staunch loyalist, for violating the only rule the Trump administration cares about. The rule that says you don’t show up the boss.

In the end, it wasn’t the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis that cost Noem her job. Nor was it her immediate reaction to prematurely paint both the mom-of-three and the veterans’ nurse as wannabe terrorists and aspiring cop killers. It wasn’t the sexual relationship she allegedly had with Lewandowski (both are married and have denied the relationship), the exorbitant spending on executive jets, or the public messaging from her agency which was riddled with White nationalist dog whistles and error-prone descriptions of immigrants.

Before cameras and a packed audience at a Congressional hearing called to ask Noem how she was spending the money they had appropriated, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana asked a series of questions about the $220 million ad campaign Noem has executed, mostly for television ads featuring herself, and how that squared with Noem’s stated promise to root out waste from her agency. Kennedy had to ask more than once whether Trump approved that spending spree before Noem provided a direct answer: “Mmhmm, yes.”

That response, it turned out, was the embattled Cabinet secretary’s final straw. Kennedy got a call from Trump later that evening. The president, Kennedy told CNN, “Was pissed. Her version and the president’s version of whether the president, A) was informed and B) consented are decidedly different,” Kennedy said. (Trump told NBC News that he hadn’t known about the advertising campaign. “I wasn’t thrilled with it,” he said.)

Bye Bye, Bondi

Attorney General Pam Bondi was the next to bite the dust. Bondi, who had been one of Trump’s personal lawyers and the Attorney General of Florida, turned the Department of Justice into the primary instrument of Trump’s revenge on political opponents. She fired career attorneys who had worked on investigations into Trump during the Biden administration. And she allowed FBI Director Kash Patel to fire FBI agents who had worked on those investigations. These people are nonpartisans who are assigned by the top political officers. They are not in a position to pick and choose their cases. She also turned traditionally nonpartisan employees, including assistant U.S. Attorneys, Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and the Office of the Pardon Attorney into political hacks.

But that is not why Trump fired her. Pam Bondi was fired by President Trump due to dissatisfaction with her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and perceived underperformance in pursuing investigations against his political adversaries. In other words, she didn’t cover-up enough, and her efforts to deliver of his promise of retribution against his perceived enemies fell short. Trump cannot understand why some lawyers and many judges take seriously their oath to uphold the law and the Constitution. Bondi was a true believer and completely loyal to her liege lord. But she couldn’t bend everyone in the judicial system to her will.

Lori Leaves

Trump’s labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, appears to have left after a misconduct investigation, not simply for routine political reasons. Reports say the probe involved allegations of misconduct and possible abuse of power, including claims that led to senior staff being placed on leave or resigning.

One account says she had been under a watchdog probe, senior staff were placed on leave or quit, and her schedule was increasingly disrupted because the controversy had made her politically toxic. There were also related allegations involving her husband, which added to the turmoil around the department.

Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation was not announced by President Trump, unlike the other recent Cabinet firings, but by White House communications director Steven Cheung on social media. The moral here is don’t create a scandal that takes the focus off the president or he won’t know you. The White House framed her exit as a move to a private-sector role.

#####

It’s Almost Time For MLB’s Underachievers To Rearrange Some Deck Chairs

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/its-almost-time-for-mlbs-underachievers-to-rearrange-some-deck-chairs

It’s Almost Time For MLB’s Underachievers To Rearrange Some Deck Chairs

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/its-almost-time-for-mlbs-underachievers-to-rearrange-some-deck-chairs

It’s Almost Time For MLB’s Underachievers To Rearrange Some Deck Chairs

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/its-almost-time-for-mlbs-underachievers-to-rearrange-some-deck-chairs

It’s Almost Time For MLB’s Underachievers To Rearrange Some Deck Chairs

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/its-almost-time-for-mlbs-underachievers-to-rearrange-some-deck-chairs

The Red Sox Can’t Even Clean House With Dignity

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/the-red-sox-cant-even-clean-house-with-dignity

The Red Sox Can’t Even Clean House With Dignity

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/the-red-sox-cant-even-clean-house-with-dignity

The Red Sox Can’t Even Clean House With Dignity

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/the-red-sox-cant-even-clean-house-with-dignity

The Red Sox Can’t Even Clean House With Dignity

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/the-red-sox-cant-even-clean-house-with-dignity

https://www.europesays.com/es/514873/ Disney busca cientos de extras de todas las edades en España para su próxima película: todo lo que necesitas saber sobre el casting #american #americas #BestPhoto #BestPhotos #building #buildings #Cine #Entertainment #Entretenimiento #ES #España #exteriors #Film #firings #JobCuts #layoffs #Logo #Movies #NorthAmerican #Sign #Signage #Signs #Spain #stands #US #USA #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #US #usa #WaltDisneyStudios

Chelsea Manager Gets Fired, As All Chelsea Managers Do

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/chelsea-manager-gets-fired-as-all-chelsea-managers-do

Doc Rivers Ends Bucks Tenure That Was A Huge Waste Of Everyone’s Time

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/doc-rivers-ends-bucks-tenure-that-was-a-huge-waste-of-everyones-time

Doc Rivers Ends Bucks Tenure That Was A Huge Waste Of Everyone’s Time

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/doc-rivers-ends-bucks-tenure-that-was-a-huge-waste-of-everyones-time

Doc Rivers Ends Bucks Tenure That Was A Huge Waste Of Everyone’s Time

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/doc-rivers-ends-bucks-tenure-that-was-a-huge-waste-of-everyones-time

Doc Rivers Ends Bucks Tenure That Was A Huge Waste Of Everyone’s Time

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/doc-rivers-ends-bucks-tenure-that-was-a-huge-waste-of-everyones-time

Pam Bondi Fails to Make Her Case

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/pam-bondi-fails-to-make-her-case

Pam Bondi’s Legacy of Flattery and Destruction

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/pam-bondis-legacy-of-flattery-and-destruction

The #SCOTUS ruling comes despite a series of short-term wins on the court’s “emergency docket” that have allowed #Trump to push ahead with extraordinary flexes of #ExecutivePower on issues ranging from high-profile #firings to major federal #funding cuts.

#law #economy #tariffs #inflation #affordability #CostOfLiving #geopolitics

The #SCOTUS ruling comes despite a series of short-term wins on the court’s “emergency docket” that have allowed #Trump to push ahead with extraordinary flexes of #ExecutivePower on issues ranging from high-profile #firings to major federal #funding cuts.

#law #economy #tariffs #inflation #affordability #CostOfLiving #geopolitics

The #SCOTUS ruling comes despite a series of short-term wins on the court’s “emergency docket” that have allowed #Trump to push ahead with extraordinary flexes of #ExecutivePower on issues ranging from high-profile #firings to major federal #funding cuts.

#law #economy #tariffs #inflation #affordability #CostOfLiving #geopolitics

The #SCOTUS ruling comes despite a series of short-term wins on the court’s “emergency docket” that have allowed #Trump to push ahead with extraordinary flexes of #ExecutivePower on issues ranging from high-profile #firings to major federal #funding cuts.

#law #economy #tariffs #inflation #affordability #CostOfLiving #geopolitics

The #SCOTUS ruling comes despite a series of short-term wins on the court’s “emergency docket” that have allowed #Trump to push ahead with extraordinary flexes of #ExecutivePower on issues ranging from high-profile #firings to major federal #funding cuts.

#law #economy #tariffs #inflation #affordability #CostOfLiving #geopolitics

#NOTUS #SCOTUS #TFG #Firings

"If the seminal case is overturned, Republicans may come to regret allowing the executive branch to accumulate such power, Slaughter continued.

“I can’t imagine they will like the results of the argument they are making when there is a Democratic president in the future who acts with similar lack of guardrails,” Slaughter said."

https://www.notus.org/courts/fired-ftc-commissioner-rebecca-slaughter-interview

#NOTUS #SCOTUS #TFG #Firings

"If the seminal case is overturned, Republicans may come to regret allowing the executive branch to accumulate such power, Slaughter continued.

“I can’t imagine they will like the results of the argument they are making when there is a Democratic president in the future who acts with similar lack of guardrails,” Slaughter said."

https://www.notus.org/courts/fired-ftc-commissioner-rebecca-slaughter-interview

#NOTUS #SCOTUS #TFG #Firings

"If the seminal case is overturned, Republicans may come to regret allowing the executive branch to accumulate such power, Slaughter continued.

“I can’t imagine they will like the results of the argument they are making when there is a Democratic president in the future who acts with similar lack of guardrails,” Slaughter said."

https://www.notus.org/courts/fired-ftc-commissioner-rebecca-slaughter-interview

#NOTUS #SCOTUS #TFG #Firings

"If the seminal case is overturned, Republicans may come to regret allowing the executive branch to accumulate such power, Slaughter continued.

“I can’t imagine they will like the results of the argument they are making when there is a Democratic president in the future who acts with similar lack of guardrails,” Slaughter said."

https://www.notus.org/courts/fired-ftc-commissioner-rebecca-slaughter-interview

#NOTUS #SCOTUS #TFG #Firings

"If the seminal case is overturned, Republicans may come to regret allowing the executive branch to accumulate such power, Slaughter continued.

“I can’t imagine they will like the results of the argument they are making when there is a Democratic president in the future who acts with similar lack of guardrails,” Slaughter said."

https://www.notus.org/courts/fired-ftc-commissioner-rebecca-slaughter-interview

Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight – The New Yorker

The Daily

Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight

By David Remnick, February 8, 2026

You’re reading The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, a guide to our top stories, featuring exclusive insights from our writers and editors. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.

It’s truly impossible to keep up, isn’t it?

Last week—after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family’s dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes—the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom.

Early in his proprietorship, Bezos endorsed a new motto for the paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It turns out that one of democracy’s most celebrated media institutions can be strangled in broad daylight.

On Wednesday, Bezos and the paper’s leadership fired a third of the staff. They shuttered or vastly reduced an array of sections. Lizzie Johnson, one of the Post’s leading foreign correspondents, received her digital pink slip while working in the war zone of Ukraine. Bezos did not offer his staff the decency of a public explanation, much less a gesture of generosity or regret. The publisher and C.E.O. Will Lewis did not appear on the “webinar” at which the cuts were explained to the staff. He did, however, manage to head off to the Super Bowl festivities. By Saturday evening, Lewis had resigned. His work was done. He will be succeeded by the paper’s chief financial officer, Jeff D’Onofrio, who has held posts at Tumblr, Google, and Yahoo.

As someone who worked happily at the Post for a decade a long time ago, and as an ardent reader of the paper, I am sick about all this. I feel like someone forced to watch an arsonist torch the house he grew up in. I cannot imagine how it must feel for the current staff and the hundreds forced to leave. If that is sentimentality or worse, well, then guilty as charged. The loss is terrible, the behavior is beyond heedless. The reporters and editors who remain at the Post will undoubtedly go on doing honorable work, but they must now do so for a proprietor who shows them no respect. And that is no way to live. (Ruth Marcus, a writer and editor at the paper for more than forty years, brings home superbly the anger and the sadness of the situation.)

Over the years, in these pages, I’ve written about both the former owner Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the paper’s Watergate-era editor; for all their complexities, these were figures who built a great newspaper out of a mediocre one, who developed an institution that worked not only in the interest of financial gain but of democratic vitality. That standard of quality endured, but, by 2013, Don Graham, a decent man and a devoted publisher who inherited the leadership of the company from his mother, came to realize that the revolutions in technology and the declines in advertising were so severe that he no longer had the capacity to invest effectively in the paper. After a long search, he sold the Post to Bezos, a vastly wealthier owner who promised to be an effective custodian.

For a while that worked; under Marty Baron, the paper was fiercely competitive, and thrived during Trump’s first term in office. Bezos was a decidedly detached owner, but he gave the newsroom what it needed and invested in both journalism and the technological support it requires.

But during the Biden years, readership declined and, by 2024, as Trump headed toward a second election victory, Bezos clearly reassessed his interests and his sense of risk. His timidity prevailed. He quashed the paper’s impending endorsement of Kamala Harris. He sat in Oligarch Row at the Inauguration. He instructed the Opinion section to set a new, more conservative course. These were his prerogatives, many argued, but they were hardly wise. With every move, more subscribers fled—surely one of the worst own goals in the history of the news business.

Undoubtedly, Bezos believes that all the criticism that has come his way is naïve, self-righteous, and terribly unfair. How could his critics possibly understand the business the way he does? In some sense, every aggressive story on the Administration that the paper publishes allows Bezos to tell himself that he has not retreated at all.

For the sake of financial and moral context, perhaps this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the maritime interests of the Post’s proprietor. Some commentators have mentioned that Bezos, in order to better support the Post, might have held on to the tens of millions of dollars he spent to bankroll “Melania,” a documentary portrait of the First Lady worthy of a long run at the Pyongyang Cinematheque. Cooler financial heads will contend that this is a cheap point. The Post’s losses are more significant. And they are right. Better then to turn to one of the Amazon founder’s more expensive recreations, his 125.8-metre, three-masted sailing yacht, Koru. (No need to get into the details of Abeona, the seventy-five-million-dollar “shadow boat” that trails Koru and provides a helipad and adequate space for extra staff.)

Koru cost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This is double what Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Annual maintenance runs tens of millions of dollars. It is, to be sure, a very special boat. According to Architectural Digest, “Bezos’s superyacht has a classical style, with a navy-blue steel hull and a two-level white aluminum superstructure. The ship’s teak decks include spots for outdoor lounging as well as three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool. Robb Report notes that the hull features traditional portholes, while the upper deck windows are smaller than typical, which might help to foil paparazzi trying to capture guests inside.” If that information about the boat is not galling enough, there is more: the Journal published a story on Friday by Richard Rubin headlined “Trump’s New Tax Law Saved Amazon Billions.” But the Ukraine correspondent had to go.

In the world of tech, so many of the leading tycoons and V.C. geniuses have a way of convincing themselves that because they have made a fortune, because they know one big thing, they know everything. Everyone else is a Luddite or a dewy-eyed fool. Maybe Bezos will find a way to stay in good odor with a vindictive President and, at the same time, transform the Post so that it can “do more with less,” and all those other whiteboard phrases popular from Wall Street to Palo Alto. No one doubts that change, even painful change, is necessary. But the scale of the cuts last week, coupled with the lack of any sense of a strategy other than retreat, is beyond demoralizing. Bezos has made it plain that his commitment to the Post, to say nothing of his performative talk about democracy, has diminished to the vanishing point.

The Post is hardly the first major American publication to face a financial crisis. It wasn’t so long ago that the Times was caught in an existential fix. Who would buy it, people asked knowingly, the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim or Michael Bloomberg? And yet the Sulzberger family, with a tiny fraction of the Bezos fortune but infinitely greater determination and integrity, found a way to thrive.

Bezos, by contrast, is immersed in his primary business, a space race, an active vacation life, and much else. After a promising beginning at the paper, he just does not seem to have the focus or the courage to do what is necessary to guide the Post through an unstable and threatening era. With Trump in office, he refuses to see that, although the Post is valued less in financial terms than his yacht, he is responsible for a priceless commodity. Will he rock the boat? Will he ultimately do the right thing? So far, the evidence offers only misery.

 Editor’s Note: Thank you, David Remnick, good article and journalism. The dying of a national newspaper, which all my life I was proud of say, “Independent,” but no more. –DrWeb

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight | The New Yorker

Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight – The New Yorker

The Daily

Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight

By David Remnick, February 8, 2026

You’re reading The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, a guide to our top stories, featuring exclusive insights from our writers and editors. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.

It’s truly impossible to keep up, isn’t it?

Last week—after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family’s dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes—the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom.

Early in his proprietorship, Bezos endorsed a new motto for the paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It turns out that one of democracy’s most celebrated media institutions can be strangled in broad daylight.

On Wednesday, Bezos and the paper’s leadership fired a third of the staff. They shuttered or vastly reduced an array of sections. Lizzie Johnson, one of the Post’s leading foreign correspondents, received her digital pink slip while working in the war zone of Ukraine. Bezos did not offer his staff the decency of a public explanation, much less a gesture of generosity or regret. The publisher and C.E.O. Will Lewis did not appear on the “webinar” at which the cuts were explained to the staff. He did, however, manage to head off to the Super Bowl festivities. By Saturday evening, Lewis had resigned. His work was done. He will be succeeded by the paper’s chief financial officer, Jeff D’Onofrio, who has held posts at Tumblr, Google, and Yahoo.

As someone who worked happily at the Post for a decade a long time ago, and as an ardent reader of the paper, I am sick about all this. I feel like someone forced to watch an arsonist torch the house he grew up in. I cannot imagine how it must feel for the current staff and the hundreds forced to leave. If that is sentimentality or worse, well, then guilty as charged. The loss is terrible, the behavior is beyond heedless. The reporters and editors who remain at the Post will undoubtedly go on doing honorable work, but they must now do so for a proprietor who shows them no respect. And that is no way to live. (Ruth Marcus, a writer and editor at the paper for more than forty years, brings home superbly the anger and the sadness of the situation.)

Over the years, in these pages, I’ve written about both the former owner Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the paper’s Watergate-era editor; for all their complexities, these were figures who built a great newspaper out of a mediocre one, who developed an institution that worked not only in the interest of financial gain but of democratic vitality. That standard of quality endured, but, by 2013, Don Graham, a decent man and a devoted publisher who inherited the leadership of the company from his mother, came to realize that the revolutions in technology and the declines in advertising were so severe that he no longer had the capacity to invest effectively in the paper. After a long search, he sold the Post to Bezos, a vastly wealthier owner who promised to be an effective custodian.

For a while that worked; under Marty Baron, the paper was fiercely competitive, and thrived during Trump’s first term in office. Bezos was a decidedly detached owner, but he gave the newsroom what it needed and invested in both journalism and the technological support it requires.

But during the Biden years, readership declined and, by 2024, as Trump headed toward a second election victory, Bezos clearly reassessed his interests and his sense of risk. His timidity prevailed. He quashed the paper’s impending endorsement of Kamala Harris. He sat in Oligarch Row at the Inauguration. He instructed the Opinion section to set a new, more conservative course. These were his prerogatives, many argued, but they were hardly wise. With every move, more subscribers fled—surely one of the worst own goals in the history of the news business.

Undoubtedly, Bezos believes that all the criticism that has come his way is naïve, self-righteous, and terribly unfair. How could his critics possibly understand the business the way he does? In some sense, every aggressive story on the Administration that the paper publishes allows Bezos to tell himself that he has not retreated at all.

For the sake of financial and moral context, perhaps this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the maritime interests of the Post’s proprietor. Some commentators have mentioned that Bezos, in order to better support the Post, might have held on to the tens of millions of dollars he spent to bankroll “Melania,” a documentary portrait of the First Lady worthy of a long run at the Pyongyang Cinematheque. Cooler financial heads will contend that this is a cheap point. The Post’s losses are more significant. And they are right. Better then to turn to one of the Amazon founder’s more expensive recreations, his 125.8-metre, three-masted sailing yacht, Koru. (No need to get into the details of Abeona, the seventy-five-million-dollar “shadow boat” that trails Koru and provides a helipad and adequate space for extra staff.)

Koru cost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This is double what Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Annual maintenance runs tens of millions of dollars. It is, to be sure, a very special boat. According to Architectural Digest, “Bezos’s superyacht has a classical style, with a navy-blue steel hull and a two-level white aluminum superstructure. The ship’s teak decks include spots for outdoor lounging as well as three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool. Robb Report notes that the hull features traditional portholes, while the upper deck windows are smaller than typical, which might help to foil paparazzi trying to capture guests inside.” If that information about the boat is not galling enough, there is more: the Journal published a story on Friday by Richard Rubin headlined “Trump’s New Tax Law Saved Amazon Billions.” But the Ukraine correspondent had to go.

In the world of tech, so many of the leading tycoons and V.C. geniuses have a way of convincing themselves that because they have made a fortune, because they know one big thing, they know everything. Everyone else is a Luddite or a dewy-eyed fool. Maybe Bezos will find a way to stay in good odor with a vindictive President and, at the same time, transform the Post so that it can “do more with less,” and all those other whiteboard phrases popular from Wall Street to Palo Alto. No one doubts that change, even painful change, is necessary. But the scale of the cuts last week, coupled with the lack of any sense of a strategy other than retreat, is beyond demoralizing. Bezos has made it plain that his commitment to the Post, to say nothing of his performative talk about democracy, has diminished to the vanishing point.

The Post is hardly the first major American publication to face a financial crisis. It wasn’t so long ago that the Times was caught in an existential fix. Who would buy it, people asked knowingly, the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim or Michael Bloomberg? And yet the Sulzberger family, with a tiny fraction of the Bezos fortune but infinitely greater determination and integrity, found a way to thrive.

Bezos, by contrast, is immersed in his primary business, a space race, an active vacation life, and much else. After a promising beginning at the paper, he just does not seem to have the focus or the courage to do what is necessary to guide the Post through an unstable and threatening era. With Trump in office, he refuses to see that, although the Post is valued less in financial terms than his yacht, he is responsible for a priceless commodity. Will he rock the boat? Will he ultimately do the right thing? So far, the evidence offers only misery.

 Editor’s Note: Thank you, David Remnick, good article and journalism. The dying of a national newspaper, which all my life I was proud of say, “Independent,” but no more. –DrWeb

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight | The New Yorker

Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight – The New Yorker

The Daily

Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight

By David Remnick, February 8, 2026

You’re reading The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, a guide to our top stories, featuring exclusive insights from our writers and editors. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.

It’s truly impossible to keep up, isn’t it?

Last week—after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family’s dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes—the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom.

Early in his proprietorship, Bezos endorsed a new motto for the paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It turns out that one of democracy’s most celebrated media institutions can be strangled in broad daylight.

On Wednesday, Bezos and the paper’s leadership fired a third of the staff. They shuttered or vastly reduced an array of sections. Lizzie Johnson, one of the Post’s leading foreign correspondents, received her digital pink slip while working in the war zone of Ukraine. Bezos did not offer his staff the decency of a public explanation, much less a gesture of generosity or regret. The publisher and C.E.O. Will Lewis did not appear on the “webinar” at which the cuts were explained to the staff. He did, however, manage to head off to the Super Bowl festivities. By Saturday evening, Lewis had resigned. His work was done. He will be succeeded by the paper’s chief financial officer, Jeff D’Onofrio, who has held posts at Tumblr, Google, and Yahoo.

As someone who worked happily at the Post for a decade a long time ago, and as an ardent reader of the paper, I am sick about all this. I feel like someone forced to watch an arsonist torch the house he grew up in. I cannot imagine how it must feel for the current staff and the hundreds forced to leave. If that is sentimentality or worse, well, then guilty as charged. The loss is terrible, the behavior is beyond heedless. The reporters and editors who remain at the Post will undoubtedly go on doing honorable work, but they must now do so for a proprietor who shows them no respect. And that is no way to live. (Ruth Marcus, a writer and editor at the paper for more than forty years, brings home superbly the anger and the sadness of the situation.)

Over the years, in these pages, I’ve written about both the former owner Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the paper’s Watergate-era editor; for all their complexities, these were figures who built a great newspaper out of a mediocre one, who developed an institution that worked not only in the interest of financial gain but of democratic vitality. That standard of quality endured, but, by 2013, Don Graham, a decent man and a devoted publisher who inherited the leadership of the company from his mother, came to realize that the revolutions in technology and the declines in advertising were so severe that he no longer had the capacity to invest effectively in the paper. After a long search, he sold the Post to Bezos, a vastly wealthier owner who promised to be an effective custodian.

For a while that worked; under Marty Baron, the paper was fiercely competitive, and thrived during Trump’s first term in office. Bezos was a decidedly detached owner, but he gave the newsroom what it needed and invested in both journalism and the technological support it requires.

But during the Biden years, readership declined and, by 2024, as Trump headed toward a second election victory, Bezos clearly reassessed his interests and his sense of risk. His timidity prevailed. He quashed the paper’s impending endorsement of Kamala Harris. He sat in Oligarch Row at the Inauguration. He instructed the Opinion section to set a new, more conservative course. These were his prerogatives, many argued, but they were hardly wise. With every move, more subscribers fled—surely one of the worst own goals in the history of the news business.

Undoubtedly, Bezos believes that all the criticism that has come his way is naïve, self-righteous, and terribly unfair. How could his critics possibly understand the business the way he does? In some sense, every aggressive story on the Administration that the paper publishes allows Bezos to tell himself that he has not retreated at all.

For the sake of financial and moral context, perhaps this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the maritime interests of the Post’s proprietor. Some commentators have mentioned that Bezos, in order to better support the Post, might have held on to the tens of millions of dollars he spent to bankroll “Melania,” a documentary portrait of the First Lady worthy of a long run at the Pyongyang Cinematheque. Cooler financial heads will contend that this is a cheap point. The Post’s losses are more significant. And they are right. Better then to turn to one of the Amazon founder’s more expensive recreations, his 125.8-metre, three-masted sailing yacht, Koru. (No need to get into the details of Abeona, the seventy-five-million-dollar “shadow boat” that trails Koru and provides a helipad and adequate space for extra staff.)

Koru cost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This is double what Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Annual maintenance runs tens of millions of dollars. It is, to be sure, a very special boat. According to Architectural Digest, “Bezos’s superyacht has a classical style, with a navy-blue steel hull and a two-level white aluminum superstructure. The ship’s teak decks include spots for outdoor lounging as well as three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool. Robb Report notes that the hull features traditional portholes, while the upper deck windows are smaller than typical, which might help to foil paparazzi trying to capture guests inside.” If that information about the boat is not galling enough, there is more: the Journal published a story on Friday by Richard Rubin headlined “Trump’s New Tax Law Saved Amazon Billions.” But the Ukraine correspondent had to go.

In the world of tech, so many of the leading tycoons and V.C. geniuses have a way of convincing themselves that because they have made a fortune, because they know one big thing, they know everything. Everyone else is a Luddite or a dewy-eyed fool. Maybe Bezos will find a way to stay in good odor with a vindictive President and, at the same time, transform the Post so that it can “do more with less,” and all those other whiteboard phrases popular from Wall Street to Palo Alto. No one doubts that change, even painful change, is necessary. But the scale of the cuts last week, coupled with the lack of any sense of a strategy other than retreat, is beyond demoralizing. Bezos has made it plain that his commitment to the Post, to say nothing of his performative talk about democracy, has diminished to the vanishing point.

The Post is hardly the first major American publication to face a financial crisis. It wasn’t so long ago that the Times was caught in an existential fix. Who would buy it, people asked knowingly, the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim or Michael Bloomberg? And yet the Sulzberger family, with a tiny fraction of the Bezos fortune but infinitely greater determination and integrity, found a way to thrive.

Bezos, by contrast, is immersed in his primary business, a space race, an active vacation life, and much else. After a promising beginning at the paper, he just does not seem to have the focus or the courage to do what is necessary to guide the Post through an unstable and threatening era. With Trump in office, he refuses to see that, although the Post is valued less in financial terms than his yacht, he is responsible for a priceless commodity. Will he rock the boat? Will he ultimately do the right thing? So far, the evidence offers only misery.

 Editor’s Note: Thank you, David Remnick, good article and journalism. The dying of a national newspaper, which all my life I was proud of say, “Independent,” but no more. –DrWeb

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight | The New Yorker

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post – The New Yorker

Editor’s Note: My apologies to The New Yorker for publishing the entire article, which is under their copyright. I believe this is very important reporting for people to read, and consider. –DrWeb

Annals of Communications

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post

The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.

By Ruth Marcus, February 4, 2026

On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.

Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”

The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”

I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”

The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.)

In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”

It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration.

During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.

Video From The New Yorker Swift Justice: A Taliban Courtroom in Session

Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.

I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.

But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth.

Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.

Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”)

At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.

The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.

Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024.

“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”

Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)

Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa.

These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.

The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”

Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”

As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”

Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”

At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”

Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.

There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.”

My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.

In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper.

“Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦

Continue/Read Original Article Here: How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post | The New Yorker

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post – The New Yorker

Editor’s Note: My apologies to The New Yorker for publishing the entire article, which is under their copyright. I believe this is very important reporting for people to read, and consider. –DrWeb

Annals of Communications

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post

The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.

By Ruth Marcus, February 4, 2026

On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.

Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”

The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”

I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”

The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.)

In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”

It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration.

During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.

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Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.

I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.

But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth.

Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.

Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”)

At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.

The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.

Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024.

“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”

Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)

Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa.

These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.

The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”

Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”

As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”

Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”

At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”

Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.

There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.”

My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.

In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper.

“Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦

Continue/Read Original Article Here: How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post | The New Yorker

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post – The New Yorker

Editor’s Note: My apologies to The New Yorker for publishing the entire article, which is under their copyright. I believe this is very important reporting for people to read, and consider. –DrWeb

Annals of Communications

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post

The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.

By Ruth Marcus, February 4, 2026

On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.

Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”

The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”

I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”

The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.)

In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”

It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration.

During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.

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Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.

I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.

But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth.

Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.

Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”)

At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.

The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.

Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024.

“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”

Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)

Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa.

These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.

The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”

Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”

As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”

Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”

At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”

Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.

There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.”

My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.

In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper.

“Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦

Continue/Read Original Article Here: How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post | The New Yorker

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