The Washington Post Is in Free Fall—and There’s One Person to Blame

The Washington Post laid off more than 300 journalists today, including a huge chunk of its reporters covering international news, local news, and sports. It’s the latest stage in the slow-motion destruction of what had been one of most respected news organizations in the world, coming after owner Jeff Bezos infamously blocked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris on the eve of the 2024 election and, a few months later, shifted the paper’s opinion section to be much more pro-Trump.

What’s happening at the Post is a tragedy and a huge missed opportunity. And I don’t just say that just because I’m both a journalist and a former Post staffer. America desperately needs, more than any point in my lifetime, a robust news organization with hundreds of reporters and editors who are firmly committed to fairness and accuracy but also willing to be honest and forthright about the radicalism of Trump and the current Republican Party. A paper whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness” should be that outlet. But one man opposes that vision, and sadly, only Jeff Bezos’s opinion counts.

Let me start with that robustness, and why it’s so distressing to see it diminished. The Post laying off reporters is a different action than CBS News installing a right-wing ideologue (which is what Bari Weiss functionally is, though she would deny it) at the top of its news organization. But in some ways, the results are the same: the dismantling of crucial journalism infrastructures that can’t be easily replaced.

The Post and CBS not only have huge teams of journalists, but they have over decades built complicated systems to cover major stories and break news. So at the Post, complex stories often have two reporters; an editor who oversees the story and initially edits the piece; another editor or two who make further changes; a copy editor who reads each story super carefully for any factual or grammatical errors; and a lawyer who reviews the article to make sure none of its claims could lead to a lawsuit against the paper. These people have often worked together for years and even decades. 60 Minutes and other CBS News programs have similar structures.

And because of decades of doing this work accurately, CBS, the Post and other such institutions have built a lot of trust. I suspect most Americans generally think that if CBS or the Post says, “Candidate X won this election,” they believe them. Foreign governments interact with Post reporters and consider the paper an important arbiter of foreign policy disputes.

At CBS, Weiss is undermining that credibility because everyone knows she is putting her thumb on the scale to push stories to the right. She is also weakening that infrastructure because key staffers are quitting instead of working for her. By laying off foreign correspondents and other key staffers, the Post is directly eliminating this infrastructure. And this can’t easily be replaced. I love all of the various newsletters on Substack and other platforms that have cropped up in the last few years. The New Republic, Mother Jones, and other avowedly liberal media outlets are critical. But at the end of the day, none of those titles have reporters around the world covering the news, or teams of editors and reporters who can spend months on a single investigative project.

The mainstream media has many, many flaws. And The New York Times, Associated Press, CNN, Reuters, and numerous other outlets with foreign bureaus and huge news teams remain. But the Post once approached the ambition and scale of the Times. It was great to have a second paper of that stature. It’s sad to see that gone.

Now, let me move to that forthrightness and honesty about the Republican Party. I worked at the Post as a reporter from 2007 to 2011. Back then, the paper was struggling financially and was in some ways adrift journalistically too. The rise of Trump revitalized the Post. A presidential administration that was constantly trying to flout democratic norms and hide its corrupt and often illegal actions was a perfect foil for the paper. During Trump’s first term, it broke numerous stories of the president’s misdeeds. That resulted in a huge surge in subscriptions and readership.

And while the paper denied that the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan that it adopted in 2017 was about Trump, its coverage approach, more than that of the Times or other outlets, seemed to recognize that Trump was a unique threat to American democracy.

After Trump left office, there was an opportunity for the paper to distinguish itself by fully leaning into that pro-democracy mission. Early in Joe Biden’s term, leaders at CNN and the Times in particular hinted that they were going to move their outlets to the right to rebut charges they were liberally biased. And while Trump was out of office, plenty of antidemocracy MAGA Republicans like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis were abusing their power at the state level. There was fertile journalistic ground and a clear market lane for defending democracy.

But that was not what Bezos wanted. In 2022, Bezos got in a tit-for-tat with the Biden White House. He blasted the administration for high inflation; the administration said billionaires and the wealthy should pay more in taxes. I (correctly) suspected that Bezos’s real beef was that the Biden administration and the Democratic Party were becoming more Bernie Sanders–ish: skeptical of Big Tech, major corporations, and billionaires like Bezos. It was increasingly clear that the superwealthy would have to align with either a populist Democratic Party or an antidemocratic GOP—and many would choose the latter.

In 2023, the Post started not renewing the contracts of liberal columnists and had others write less, moves that I think were designed to appease an owner who had grown increasingly conservative. You know the rest. Bezos blocked the Harris endorsement; the paper’s opinion leadership blocked a cartoon that mocked Bezos and other billionaires for trying to court Trump; Bezos was seated a few rows behind where Trump spoke at his inauguration; he announced the opinion section would be about “free markets and personal liberties”; left-leaning opinion columnists like me were offered buyouts, while others were fired.

The Post is casting these current layoffs as modernizing the paper. And the paper has lost money in recent years. But Bezos is one of the richest people in the history of the world. He could run the Post at a loss because he views it as an asset to democracy. Or he could probably sell the paper to someone who would keep its current staffing levels. But Bezos is keeping the paper, likely because he wants to curry favor with the Trump administration and have influence in Washington. I suspect the Post in the future will be political news, pro-Trump editorials, and little else.

That’s not nothing. The Post has broken many stories in Trump’s second term that are critical of the president. Perhaps that will continue. But in this diminished form, the Post won’t be able to match the scale and scope of the Times while being more avowedly pro-democracy and anti-authoritarianism than the Times. And that’s really sad. We are in a uniquely dangerous time in the United States. We have a radical president with three more years in office and a MAGA political movement that could endure for decades and is bent on destroying the U.S. as we know it.

The Washington Post could have been the moral center of the news industry in this era, as it was during the 1970s after breaking the Watergate scandal. It had the reporters, editors, editorial writers, columnists, researchers, lawyers, and legacy. But it didn’t have the owner. And that flaw proved fatal.