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:
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.
