We need the Washington Post too much to give up on it entirely
Jeff Bezos’s cuts were devastating and unforgiveable. But I’m rooting for the journalists who are still there.
Jeff Bezos just about killed the Washington Post last week. It was awful.
By the latest reckoning, nearly half the newsroom is gone. The Post is no longer a local newspaper. The Post is no longer an international newspaper. The Post has abandoned readers who care about sports, books, technology, and the arts. It no longer has any photographers.
The Post is more like a Politico knockoff now – oh, the irony! -- reduced to focusing on politics, government, and national security.
This is a crushing loss. As a subscriber for most of my life, I mourn. As someone who spent 12 years at the Post working mightily to make it stronger and better, I gnash my teeth.
But the United States at this perilous moment simply cannot afford to entirely lose one of its key guarantors of accountability – no matter how venal the owner, and no matter how mixed a job the Post’s political staff has done in the past.
The Washington Post brand, more than any other in the world, stands for holding the powerful accountable. It brought down a president! We need it to continue to live – and, hopefully, to remember its core promise.
Now I realize that hard-hitting coverage of the Trump administration may not be possible anymore, given Bezos’s obvious goal of appeasement. This is his third strike: he spiked a Kamala Harris endorsement before the election, reorganized its opinion section around stupid MAGA-friendly content, and has now shattered one of Trump’s most hated newsrooms.
And let’s be real: even before this disaster, the Post’s coverage of Trump featured a lot more misses than hits. When truth-telling was urgently needed, Post coverage was way too often stenographic and credulous. (Just look at my relevant Bluesky posts.)
But there were some important hits. Among them:
A Post story in December -- “ICE documents reveal plan to hold 80,000 immigrants in warehouses” – listed the locations of 23 would-be facilities around the nation, launching what has turned out to be a major new front in the resistance to Trump.
It was the Post that revealed how Stephen Miller was the driving force behind the murderous bombing of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.
It was the Post that laid out so clearly that Trump’s antisemitism campaign was in fact a pretext for pursuing an arch-conservative social agenda.
The Post has published clarifying articles about Trump’s reshaping of the global order, his penchant for fake numbers, and how he broke the federal government.
And day in, day out, the Post has been one of the essential sources for reality-based news about what’s going on in Washington, even if sometimes you had to read between the lines to get the whole story.
We can’t afford to give up on the Post. We need it too badly.
The often-disappointing New York Times was already the preeminent news organization covering Washington – and it will only get smugger and lazier without the Washington Post nipping at its heels.
The damage being done by Trump is so vast that we need way more people calling it out, not fewer.
The Post’s Bezos-era slogan -- “Democracy Dies in Darkness” – is now a punchline. But it’s also true.
I have great respect for the people who are cancelling their subscriptions because they are morally opposed to paying a penny to the wretched centibillionaire who nearly destroyed the institution they love.
And it’s absolutely critical that the Post get new leadership. Editor Matt Murray, who no longer has a shred of credibility, needs to go. (The corrupt and incompetent publisher, Will Lewis, departed on Friday.) The only real long-term solution is for Bezos to turn the paper over to someone else – ideally a nonprofit.
But in the meantime, I’m rooting for the reporters left behind.
They must be anguished by the brutality of the carnage and the betrayal of their institution.
But I hope they can prove the critics wrong and deliver vital reporting on the disastrous impact of the Trump presidency. I hope they can continue to expose information that Trump wants hidden. I hope they can ask tough questions and fact-check the answers.
I will keep reading them. And I will keep holding them accountable.
I subscribed to WaPo for many years, and really liked their more concise editing style. So I'd read NYT if I wanted a deep dive on a topic; and WaPo if I wanted a terse but still clear take. Under Trump1 I loved WaPo.
It was the departure of Rubin, Bump and Telnaes shattered any illusions that Bezos really was turning his pet newspaper into FOX-lite. And his recent firing of 33% of the staff--that exactly coincided with his firing 20,000 Amazon workers--that also coincided with the premier of his $75 milliion bribe...err, premier of Melania--really was the last straw.
Bezos forced WaPo turn make a hard-right to mollify Trump. And when the paper's predominantly liberal audience left it in protest, he damaged the paper further by cutting even more features as to make it nearly useless. RIP WaPo.
I might agree with you that the Washington Post is needed, but maybe the time has come to go a different route. Just because fifty years ago we trusted the Post to keep us "posted" on Watergate, and the heroics that Bradlee and Graham showed against the full force of the government to quash the story, today's environment for truth may not be the right environment for the Post.
You are right that Bezos characteristally bent to the "I want to keep getting richer and I have a great opportunity to do so if I kiss Trump's ass" scenario, but the Post was in decline for at least the last few decades. Siding with Bush, Tenet et al a la Iraq, going along with the Tea Party Congress, and allowing Trump a foothold to get to the Presidency are not the type of things to keep Democracy from dying in darkness. Too many really poor writers and far right sympathizers ruined the paper for me, and for many others. I, for one, want two parties working together for the good of the country, not two ideologically-challenged puerile and infantile day care centers for the so-called "leaders" of our republic.
The Post by itself allowed itself to fall a far way down the truthlessness rabbit hole. It's time for a newer, stronger competitor to take on the challenge of keeping our leaders honest and reporting the truth.