The evisceration of The Washington Post is more than a story of a great American institution laid low by radical budget cuts ordered by an owner tired of covering its considerable losses. The Post, until recently one of the half-dozen finest news-gathering organizations in the world, is being strangled, a victim of the flagrant corruption that has despoiled this country during the reign of the most corrupt president in American history.
The leading role in this tragedy has been played by the staggeringly wealthy Jeff Bezos, who created Amazon, a triumph of American capitalism. The Post (where I worked from 1963 until my retirement in 2014) was headed for disaster when Bezos agreed to buy it in 2013 for $250 million—about 1 percent of his net worth, which was at the time about $25 billion. (He is nearly ten times wealthier now.) There should be no doubt that he was a savior then.
The sale came as a surprise. Very few people knew that the Graham family had decided earlier that year that they had to sell the Post, which the financier Eugene Meyer had bought at a bankruptcy auction in 1933 for $825,000—about $21 million in 2026 dollars for a money-losing morning paper.
The Post continued to lose money for the next twenty-one years. In 1940 Meyer’s daughter Katharine married Philip Graham, a brilliant Floridian who ran the paper from 1946 to 1963, when he killed himself after repeated episodes of manic depression. Katharine Graham then became America’s first female proprietor of a major newspaper. The Post had finally become profitable in 1954, when Meyer and Graham were able to buy Washington’s other morning paper, the Times-Herald. Profits grew along with the population of the booming region.
Both prosperity and distinguished journalism came to the Post after Benjamin C. Bradlee became its managing editor in 1965 and executive editor in 1968. In the 1990s, when I was the managing editor, the Post regularly made annual profits of more than $100 million—roughly $200 million in today’s dollars. By 2013, however, the Internet was destroying the economic model that had once made America’s big newspapers gloriously profitable. Classifieds and department store ads had all but disappeared. Some thought it might be possible to charge for reading the news online, but initially only The Wall Street Journal had the nerve to do it.
Katharine Graham’s granddaughter Katharine Weymouth, a Washington attorney who had been named publisher in 2008 and was the last Graham to run the Post, couldn’t find a way to keep it in the black. Her uncle Donald Graham, who had been the publisher from 1979 to 2000, managed to convince his friend Bezos to buy it.
Bezos at the time was not a celebrity. He lived relatively quietly in Seattle with his wife, the novelist MacKenzie Scott, and their four children. He worked long hours with extraordinary discipline and patience to convert the online bookstore that he had launched in 1995 into today’s retail behemoth, remaining confident and optimistic as the company kept growing for years without making a profit.
Bezos’s purchase of the Post was followed, over the next several years, by a series of changes in his previously unremarkable personal life. Friends began to remark on his altered physique. In 2017, when he was fifty-three, a newly buff Bezos showed up at the annual gathering of media and business executives in Sun Valley. That same year, court filings later disclosed, he began an extramarital affair with a Los Angeles television journalist, Lauren Sánchez, who was married to a friend of his. Bezos and Scott divorced amicably, and she received some $36 billion in the settlement. Bezos and Sánchez became a celebrity couple. He ordered a custom sailing yacht that cost half a billion dollars and spent hundreds of millions more to buy three houses on Miami’s exclusive Indian Creek, an island known as Billionaire Bunker. This became his principal residence in the mid-2020s. Last June Bezos and Sánchez staged a glitzy wedding in Venice that reportedly cost tens of millions of dollars.
It suddenly feels quaint to recall the way Bezos began his tenure as proprietor of the Post in August 2013. In a formal statement issued after his purchase was announced, he said all the right things:
The values of The Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads…. Journalism plays a critical role in a free society, and The Washington Post—as the hometown paper of the capital city of the United States—is especially important.
Bezos promised inventive experimentation to find ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age: “I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity.” In his first interview as the new owner, he predicted a new “golden era” for the Post. When he met with reporters and editors in early September 2013—the only such meeting he has held as owner—Bezos seemed to indicate that the fifteen years of belt-tightening and staff cuts that the Grahams had initiated in the late 1990s were over. Growth would be the key to a successful future, he told the Post journalists at that meeting. More cuts and staff reductions would lead to extinction “or, at best, irrelevancy,” he said. “Making money isn’t enough. [The Post] also has to be growing.”
When I attended that meeting, I was the most senior editor on the staff. I and the others present, including Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee (who was still a vice-president of the Washington Post Co.), left in a state of exhilaration. We had all been stunned by the Grahams’ decision to sell the Post, but we also understood that our version of the paper was doomed. This guy could save it by adapting it to the new realities of the Internet age. He seemed like a godsend.
He wasn’t. He started out well, and after Donald Trump’s election in 2016 he behaved well, supporting the Post against a president who hated the rigorous coverage it published day after day. Weymouth had hired Marty Baron from The Boston Globe as executive editor in January 2013. Bezos stood up for Baron and his troops against Trump’s angry denunciations of their journalism.
The Post benefited significantly from what came to be called the “Trump bump.” Its coverage of this unconventional president began to attract a huge audience; hundreds of thousands of new subscribers signed up to read the Post on their phones, tablets, and computers. Circulation of the ink-on-paper Post was declining sharply, but the online versions were thriving, thanks to what we called “the news side.”
The business side, however, continued to struggle. Initially Bezos retained Weymouth as publisher, but her failure to improve the bottom line apparently frustrated him. In September 2014 he announced the appointment of a new publisher, Fred Ryan. This proved to be a grave mistake, one that took him nine years to correct.
Ryan had never worked on a newspaper. He had been a political operative in the Reagan White House and later went to work for the Allbritton family, which owned various media properties. In 2007, when two young Post reporters sought to launch a new political website to satisfy the appetites of lobbyists and political junkies for a constant stream of news and gossip, Post executives turned them down, but the Allbrittons went for the idea. Thus Politico was born, and Ryan was assigned to help manage its business side.
How Bezos found Ryan is a revealing story. Ryan had gone to the Alfalfa dinner, one of those Washington ritual affairs where the city’s elite dresses up and tries to impress one another, with Jean Case, the wife of the cofounder of AOL. That night he told Case, “I want to be publisher of The Washington Post.” She offered to introduce him to Bezos. Months later, he had the job. How extensively Bezos checked him out before offering him the position is a mystery, but one of the editors of Politico I knew well wasn’t contacted and was unaware of any other editor there being contacted.
Among the journalists at Politico, Ryan was considered a lightweight—a cheerful, friendly guy never known for original ideas. The senior editors who reported to him at the Post—Baron and Fred Hiatt, the editor of the editorial page and the opinion columnists—found him difficult to deal with and useless as a manager.
The Trump bump helped Ryan disguise his failure to come up with new revenue sources that could help the Post survive. These were the years when Mark Thompson, a former director-general of the BBC and a smart, charming Englishman, was helping the Sulzberger family, the owners of The New York Times, come up with the combination of games, recipes, consumer product testing, and exhaustive sports coverage that has led to remarkable audience growth—the Times had nearly 13 million subscribers at the end of last year.
We at the Post used to feel we could compete with the Times (which we called Brand X) on a nearly equal footing, or best them completely, as we did on the biggest story of the late twentieth century, Watergate. With the most recent deep cuts at the Post, however, Bezos has obliterated any chance of meaningful long-term competition between the Post and the Times.
These cuts were devastating. For decades the Post had the best sports section in America; it has been wiped out. The current editor, Matt Murray, a former Wall Street Journal editor, has said that politics and government will be a primary focus for the Post now, but the cuts have also hurt that coverage. We had proudly built a distinguished staff of nearly two dozen foreign correspondents based all over the globe. Most of the current foreign staff was laid off in early February, along with the outstanding foreign editor. Without a substantial daily package of stories from its foreign correspondents, the Post will lose its appeal to potential readers around the world and become a shadow of the paper I worked on.
Why did this destruction occur? Two reasons come to mind.
First, newspapers are, with a tiny number of exceptions, crumbling. Thousands of them have gone out of business in this country since the early 1990s, when the modern Internet was born. In the next several decades, few if any will survive.
What will survive are entities that could be called news organizations. Politico is a good example of what the future may hold. It has built a profile that seems to appeal to lots of readers. Its gossip is popular, and it employs the best political reporter in the country, Jonathan Martin. In 2021 the German company Axel Springer paid a billion dollars for Politico, which is now popular in Europe as well as the US. (That was four times what Bezos paid for the legendary Washington Post.)
In its heyday the Post had a distinct identity based on good writing; aggressive coverage of both parties’ presidential administrations and Congress; fine reporting on national security issues; detailed coverage of all the local and state governments around Washington in Maryland and Virginia; great sports coverage; three pages of comics every day; a lively style section (a Bradlee invention) covering the arts and publishing; engaging stories about celebrities and culture; an eloquent, liberal editorial page featuring the best editorial cartoonist of the twentieth century, Herblock; and very good weather coverage to feed conversations on the Metro and the city’s buses. All the excellent arts and culture critics were fired. After the recent cuts and layoffs, little remains of the old Post except its journalists’ good writing, love of scoops, and traditional skepticism toward people in power.
The second important factor explaining what has happened to the Post is Donald Trump. He appears to have gotten under Bezos’s skin in 2019 when he tried to cancel a $10 billion Pentagon contract with Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest provider of cloud computing support. After a struggle, including a lawsuit, the Pentagon finally split the contract among Amazon, Microsoft, and other providers. Bezos did not publicly describe how this episode affected him, but after Trump won a second term, a new Bezos was on display.
Bezos decided, just a fortnight before the 2024 election, to order the Post editorial page not to endorse Kamala Harris for president, as it had planned to do. This last-minute intervention by the owner, the first of its kind that we know about, caused an uproar. More than 250,000 Post readers canceled their subscriptions, a serious blow to the paper’s bottom line and its reputation.
Then, in early 2025, Bezos publicly announced a new editorial policy for the Post. Henceforth its editorials would address only two subjects, personal freedom and free markets, and would do so “every day.” David Shipley, the opinion editor hired after Fred Hiatt died suddenly in 2021, abruptly resigned. More subscribers canceled. A new, conservative opinion editor was hired, and nine decades of Washington Post editorial tradition went up in smoke. Bezos, it appeared, was preparing to curry favor with the new Trump administration.
But a new editorial policy was not going to make a big impression on Trump. What seems to influence him is cash. Bezos, of course, has plenty of that. He contributed $1 million through Amazon to Trump’s inauguration slush fund. And over dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024 with Trump and his wife, Melania, Bezos and Sánchez apparently discussed paying $40 million for the rights to a documentary about Melania that MGM Studios, owned by Amazon, would distribute. It’s unlikely that anyone at that dinner table used the word “bribe” that night. In such circles, one rarely hears blunt language of that kind. The movie came out in January, the month before staff cuts crippled the Post. Melania was simply awful and did poorly at box offices across the world, despite the fact that Amazon spent more than $35 million promoting it.
Bezos hired a new publisher, Sir Will Lewis, a veteran of British newspapers, to replace the deeply unpopular Fred Ryan, whom he finally encouraged to leave in the summer of 2023. Lewis was “Sir Will” because his pal Boris Johnson had been prime minister and could recommend knighthoods for his friends. Sir Will was a disaster at the Post, whose staff he quickly alienated. An exodus of top talent began. Dozens of senior journalists left in 2025, many encouraged by a generous buyout scheme that Lewis offered. So much for Bezos’s commitment to growth.
In the thirteen years since Bezos bought The Washington Post, he has become a remote proprietor. He never held a second staff meeting after the one in 2013 that I attended. He did have several dinners with Post reporters who won Pulitzer Prizes. In 2019 he observed that owning The Washington Post “is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90.” He’s got a long way to go to reach ninety, but the chance that his pride in the Post will be noteworthy on that birthday in 2054 seems slim.
The Post is again in the market for a new publisher, but saving this splendid national treasure requires more than that. The real need now is for a new owner, or a big endowment that would allow it to carry on as a nonprofit public service. Do we know anyone who could spare a billion or two to fund such a noble cause and assure his or her place in American history?
