cutting the legs off The Washington Post
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Bezos could cover the Postal Service’s losses for “hundreds of lives.” | Credit: Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg / Getty Images
The Washington Post was, until recently, one of the most venerable newspapers in the United States, said Jill Abramson in the Boston Globe. His reporting on the Watergate scandal under legendary editor Ben Bradlee made history; the journalists responsible, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, have inspired generations of journalists since; the newspaper’s writers and photographers were admired around the world.
“Fatal wound”
Sadly, the Post Office is now a shadow of what it once was, and last week it announced it was laying off more than 300 people, a third of its already reduced workforce. Its ranks of local and international journalists are decimated and the sports and literary sections must close. It’s not a cut. It is “a mortal wound”. And it shouldn’t be confused with a “media story,” Peggy Noonan said in the Wall Street Journal. These layoffs will leave “the capital of the most powerful nation in the world” without a major newspaper – and “under the Trump administration, no less.”
“It sucks when your job blows up,” Scott McKay said in The American Spectator. But let’s be real: The Post’s glory days are long gone. The paper lost $77 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024. Last year, its weekday print circulation fell below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years, John R. Puri said in National Review. The companies that own the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are making record profits. Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million, can’t be blamed for streamlining the company. If everyone fuming about these cuts had actually read the articles by the now unemployed Post journalists, they would still have their jobs.
Accelerated decline
Bezos doesn’t care about the Post’s operating losses, Alex Kirshner said on Slate. With a net worth of $240 billion, he could support them for “hundreds of lifetimes.” When he bought the paper, he made much of the fact that he was not motivated solely by a profit motive. But lately, he seems to have used his ownership of the Post to appease Donald Trump and thereby improve the fortunes of his other interests, like Amazon and Blue Origin.
He intervened to prevent the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris for president – a decision that cost it 250,000 subscribers. He changed the newspaper’s opinion section to be more pro-Trump; he made no protest when the FBI recently raided the home of a Post reporter, seizing her devices. Bezos not only presided over the Post’s decline; he deliberately accelerated it, for the sake of “his own results”.
