"The part of the paper that covers wars and investigates corruption and holds the government (and Amazon) accountable? That’s the part he decided he could live without.

The megaphone stays. The newsroom goes. And if you think that’s a coincidence, I’ve got a $500 million yacht to sell you."

#JeffBezos #Trump #WashingtonPost #fascism #techbros #EconomicElites
/2

"Bezos didn’t let the Post die. He chose which part lives. He spent the last two years remaking the opinion section into his ideological megaphone while letting the newsroom bleed out. And this week he finished the job."

~ Parker Molloy

#JeffBezos #Trump #WashingtonPost #fascism #techbros #EconomicElites
/1

https://www.readtpa.com/p/jeff-bezos-gutted-the-newsroom-he

#WashingtonPost #amazon #jeffbezos lasciamo parlare i fatti...

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post – The New Yorker

Editor’s Note: My apologies to The New Yorker for publishing the entire article, which is under their copyright. I believe this is very important reporting for people to read, and consider. –DrWeb

Annals of Communications

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post

The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.

By Ruth Marcus, February 4, 2026

On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.

The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.

Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.”

The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”

I asked Maraniss what cuts of this magnitude would mean for the institution. “I don’t even want to call it the Washington Post,” he said. “I don’t know what it’ll be without all of that.”

The first sign of impending layoffs came in late January, when the sports staff was informed that plans to send writers to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics had been cancelled. (Management later agreed to send a smaller crew.)

In the following days, as rumors began to spread of severe cuts, the paper’s reporters began posting messages directed at Bezos on X, with the plaintive hashtag #SaveThePost. “Our reporters on the ground drove exclusive coverage during pivotal moments of recent history,” the foreign staff wrote to Bezos. “We have so much left to do.” The local staff noted that it had already been slashed in half in the past five years. “Watergate,” they wrote, “started as a local story.”

It did not help the staff’s morale that Lewis and his team were hobnobbing in Davos, or that Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, were in Paris for Haute Couture Week. More troubling were reminders that Bezos, who once emblazoned “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the paper’s masthead, appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward the Trump Administration.

During the first Trump term, Bezos stood by the Post even when his stewardship threatened to cost him billions in government contracts. Now Bezos had not said a word about a recent F.B.I. raid on the home of the Post federal-government reporter Hannah Natanson, in which the agency seized her phones, laptops, and other devices. As the staff awaited the axe, the President and the First Lady celebrated the première of “Melania,” a documentary that Amazon had licensed for forty million dollars and was reported to be spending another thirty-five million to promote. The deal was inked after Bezos had dinner with the Trumps shortly before the Inauguration.

Video From The New Yorker Swift Justice: A Taliban Courtroom in Session

Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations. The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

The news industry is in “a period of head-spinning change,” Baron told me. But the Post’s problems “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron said. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

I spent more than forty years at the Post, as a reporter, an editor, an editorial writer, and a columnist. I resigned last March, after Bezos announced that the Opinions section, where I worked, would henceforth be concentrating on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets.” More alarming, Bezos advised, “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” We had been an opinion section reflecting a wide range of views—which Bezos himself had encouraged. It seemed obvious that this change was deeply misguided.

I had written a column critical of the non-endorsement decision several months earlier. The paper published it without any substantive changes. But, when I wrote a column disagreeing with the no-dissent-allowed dictum, I was told that Lewis had killed it—it apparently didn’t meet the “high bar” for the Post to write about itself—and declined my request to meet. I submitted my letter of resignation. A new editorial-page editor went on to shift both unsigned editorials and signed opinion columns dramatically to the right, to the point that no liberal columnists remain. One recent editorial praised the President’s plan for a new ballroom and excused his unauthorized bulldozing of the East Wing, saying that “the blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.” Another endorsed the move to rename the Defense Department the Department of War as “a worthy blow against government euphemism.” There are some editorials critical of Trump, but the inclination to fawning praise is unmistakable. Had I not defenestrated myself, I would, no doubt, have been advised to take my buyout and go.

But I am not—at least, I have not been—a Bezos-hater. I am grateful for the resources, financial and technological, that he devoted to the paper in his early years as owner. The surprise of Bezos’s tenure at the Post has been his bad business decisions. Fred Ryan, a former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and founding president of Politico, was hired as the publisher and C.E.O. in 2014 and oversaw a period of spectacular growth.

Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment. As traffic and revenue plunged, Ryan found himself increasingly at odds with the newsroom. He held a year-end town-hall meeting in 2022 at which he announced that layoffs were coming, and then, to the consternation of the staff, left without taking questions. As Clare Malone reported for The New Yorker, Woodward beseeched Bezos to intercede. The owner made a rare visit to the paper in January, 2023, for meetings with key staffers, taking notes on a legal pad as they poured out their anxiety.

Ryan left that summer, but Lewis, his eventual replacement, accomplished the feat of making the newsroom nostalgic for Ryan. A decade earlier, Lewis, then a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s British-tabloid empire, had played a pivotal role in dealing with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal at some of Murdoch’s papers. Lewis had said that he was acting to protect “journalistic integrity,” when the Post questioned him about his actions during that time, but in 2024 questions arose, fuelled by a civil lawsuit brought against the papers, about whether Lewis had sought to conceal evidence, including by carrying out a plan to delete millions of e-mails. (Lewis has said the allegations against him were “completely untrue.”)

At the Post, Lewis clashed with executive editor Sally Buzbee over coverage of the story, reportedly insisting that it was not newsworthy. Shortly afterward, Lewis announced Buzbee’s departure, and his plan to replace her with Robert Winnett, a former colleague of his from London’s Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. The Post and the Times both reported on how Lewis and Winnett had used fraudulently obtained material as the basis for articles. “His ambition outran his ethics,” one of Lewis’s former reporters told the Times. Winnett ended up withdrawing from the position, but the episode poisoned relations between Lewis and the newsroom.

The staff, meanwhile, became increasingly concerned that Lewis was offering corporate word salad in place of a vision to address the Post’s decline. “Fix it, build it, scale it” was his catchphrase when he arrived, in January, 2024. In June of that year came an amorphous plan for what Lewis called a “third newsroom.” (The second newsroom, we were surprised to learn, was the Opinions section.) First, it was to focus on social media and service journalism. Then it was rechristened WP Ventures and, according to a memo to staff, would “focus entirely on building personality-driven content and franchises around personalities.” By February, 2025, the situation had deteriorated to the point that two former top editors, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, wrote to Bezos about Lewis. “Replacing him is a crucial first step in saving The Washington Post,” they urged in an e-mail. Bezos never responded.

Downie, who served as executive editor from 1991 to 2008, contrasted the paths of the Times and the Post. During the past decade, the Times transformed itself into a one-stop-shopping environment that lured readers with games such as Spelling Bee, a cooking app, and a shopping guide. By the end of 2025, it was reporting close to thirteen million digital subscribers and an operating profit of more than a hundred and ninety-two million dollars. The Post does not release information about its digital subscribers, but it was reported to have two and a half million digital subscribers at the time of the non-endorsement decision, in 2024.

“One of the big differences to me was that they hired a publisher”—Ryan—“who didn’t come up with any ideas,” Downie told me. “And then when he left . . . we knew that Bezos was losing money, and we were encouraged by the fact that they were looking for somebody who could improve the business side of the paper and the circulation side of the paper. And then they chose this guy who we hardly ever heard from, who had a checkered past in British journalism.”

Writing last month on a private Listserv for former Post employees, Paul Farhi, who as the media reporter for the Post covered Bezos’s acquisition of the paper, shared his “utter mystification and bafflement” about Bezos’s tolerance of Lewis. “Even as a hands-off boss,” he wondered, “could Bezos not see what was obvious to even casual observers within a few months of Will’s arrival—that Will was ill-suited to the Post, that he had alienated the newsroom, that he had an ethically suspect past, and—most important—that none of his big ideas was working or even being implemented?” (Farhi, who took a buyout in 2023, gave me permission to quote his message.)

Even before these new cuts, a parade of key staffers had left the Post. A beloved managing editor, Matea Gold, went to the Times. The national editor, Philip Rucker, decamped to CNN, and the political reporter Josh Dawsey to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic hired, among others, three stars of the paper’s White House team: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Toluse Olorunnipa.

These are losses that would take years to rebuild—if the Post were in a rebuilding mode. The Post, Woodward said, “lives and is doing an extraordinary reporting job on the political crisis that is Donald Trump”—including its scoop on the second strike to kill survivors of an attack on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat. But the print edition is a shadow of its former self, with metro, style, and sports melded into an anemic second section; daily print circulation is now below one hundred thousand. More pressingly, it’s unclear whether a newsroom so stripped of resources can sustain the quality of its work.

The sports columnist Sally Jenkins, who left the Post in August, 2025, as part of the second wave of buyouts, has been more supportive of management than many other Post veterans. So it was striking that, when we spoke recently, she was both passionate about the work of her newsroom colleagues and unsparing about how the business side had failed them. “When you whack at these sections, you’re whacking at the roots of the tree,” she told me. “We train great journalists in every section of the paper, and we train them to cover every subject on the globe. And when you whack whole sections of people away, you are really, really in danger of killing the whole tree.” When I asked how she felt about the losses, Jenkins said, “My heart is cracked in about five different pieces.”

Jenkins, who was in California covering Super Bowl week for the Atlantic, has spent a career studying what accounts for the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Bezos, she said, had been generous with his money and laudable for never interfering in the work of the newsroom. But, she added, “making money at journalism, you have to break rocks with a shovel. You have to love thinking about journalism to the point that it wakes you up at night with an idea, and then you have to be willing to try it. And I don’t see a sense that he loves the business enough to think about it at night. It’s almost like he’s treated it like Pets.com—an interesting experiment that he’s willing to lose some money on until he’s not. But the difference with this business is it’s not Pets.com. It’s not a business that just disappears into the muck of venture capitalism. It’s a business that is essential to the survival of the Republic, for Christ’s sake. So you don’t fuck around with it like that.”

As Post staffers and alumni braced for the cuts, I called Kaiser, the former managing editor, who spent more than half a century at the paper. “Mr. Bezos’s personal system has failed him in a way I fear he doesn’t grasp,” Kaiser, now eighty-two, told me. “He has no sense of the damage that will be done to his reputation in history if he becomes seen as the man who destroyed the institution that Katharine Graham”—the famed publisher who led the paper from the sixties to the nineties—“and Ben Bradlee built.” Kaiser recalled arriving at the paper’s London bureau in 1964. “If I say, ‘I’m Kaiser from the Washington Post’—what’s that? They never heard of it.” A decade later, he was posted in Moscow, as Woodward and Carl Bernstein were breaking the Watergate story. “Explaining was not necessary,” Kaiser said. “The Russians, in fact, had a gloriously exaggerated impression of the Washington Post as the king-maker and the king-destroyer.”

Bezos, Kaiser continued, “knew what the role was, acknowledged the role—those words ‘doting parent’—and then he walked away from it. What the hell?” The damage, he predicted, will reverberate beyond the immediate cuts. “What purpose does any honorable, attractive, competent journalist have for remaining at the Post? None.”

At one point, as we talked about the transformation of the Post, Kaiser stopped himself. “I’m going to cry,” he said, and paused. “Oh, God, it’s killing me.”

Bezos may be tiring of the Post, but he has not seemed inclined to sell the paper. Nor is it clear that would be a better, or at this point even feasible, outcome. Newspapers across the country are being bought up by private-equity firms that are essentially selling off the valuable parts. But there is another model for Bezos to consider: turning the Post into a nonprofit, endowed by Bezos but operating independently of him. For Bezos, this would reduce the role of the Post as a headache and a threat to other, more favored endeavors, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. For the Post, assuming the endowment is sufficient, it would provide that continuing runway.

There are models for this approach. In Philadelphia, the late cable-television tycoon H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest purchased the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com in 2015, and the following year donated the publications to a charitable trust. “What would the city be without the Inquirer and the Daily News?” asked Lenfest, whose contribution to the endeavor has been valued at almost a hundred and thirty million dollars. In Utah, the investor Paul Huntsman bought the Salt Lake Tribune from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016; three years later, he transformed it into a nonprofit, supported in part by tax-deductible contributions from readers.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2024, Steven Waldman suggested that Bezos follow a similar course. “ ‘Nonprofit’ does not mean ‘losing money,’ ” Waldman wrote. “Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community.”

My quibble with Waldman’s pitch is that he asked Bezos to ante up a paltry hundred million. When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.

In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper.

“Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights. ♦

Continue/Read Original Article Here: How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post | The New Yorker

Jeff Bezos is an enemy of democracy.

#JeffBezos #WillLewis #AdamONeal #WashingtonPost #WaPo #Journalism #FreePress #BoycottAmazon #BoycottWholeFoods #EatTheBillionaires #USPol

The #WashingtonPost laid off nearly one-third of its staff, including its sports department and local news team, in a move that has raised #concerns about the newspaper’s future. Former executive editor #MartyBaron attributes the layoffs to owner #JeffBezos’s desire to appease #DonaldTrump and protect his other businesses, Amazon and Blue Origin. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/05/mass-layoffs-washington-post?eicker.news #tech #media #news

Former Washington Post Staffers Slam Billionaire Bezos for Gutting Paper

https://murica.website/2026/02/former-washington-post-staffers-slam-billionaire-bezos-for-gutting-paper/

Marty Baron Warns That Jeff Bezos Is Shredding ‘The Washington Post’ to “Ingratiate Himself With Donald Trump” – Vanity Fair

Politics

Marty Baron Warns That Jeff Bezos Is Shredding The Washington Post to “Ingratiate Himself With Donald Trump”

The former editor of the paper tells Vanity Fair that the “tremendous” newsroom brings in readers, but Trump has driven the owner and his publisher, Will Lewis, to decisions that have sent those readers out “the back door.”

By Aidan McLaughlin, February 5, 2026

At first, the rumors of firings at The Washington Post were understood only generally, though it was clear that the quantitative modifier for “layoffs” would be “mass.” Then, in recent weeks, reporting on the Post began to carry grim specificity: The paper was planning to entirely shutter its sports desk and radically cut back its international coverage. Finally, on Wednesday morning, executive editor Matt Murray revealed the true extent of the damage: Hundreds of staffers would be laid off, nearly a third of its roughly 800-person newsroom. The Post reportedly shut down its sports desk and books section, gutted its international team, and drastically reduced local coverage.

The firings make for a radical transformation of an iconic paper that for decades has maintained an international footprint with bureaus in Sydney, Bogotá, and Cairo, and which just a few years ago harbored not-unrealistic ambitions to compete with The New York Times on the national stage. The cuts were, in the words of Murray, “substantial newsroom reductions impacting nearly all news departments” in an effort to create a “more flexible, sustainable model.” In the words of Ashley Parker, a political reporter who recently decamped from the Post to The Atlantic, the slashing amounted to “the murder” of the paper.

“After that, he took a series of steps that were clearly intended to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump,” Marty Baron said of Jeff Bezos.

In his communique, Murray chose not to acknowledge the $250 billion elephant in the room: Jeff Bezos. When the billionaire Amazon founder bought the paper in 2013, he promised to have “the courage to say, ‘Follow the story,’ no matter the cost.” But his recent stewardship of the Post—the spiking of an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris on the eve of the 2024 election, for instance, sparked a bloody subscriber exodus—has led to allegations he is vandalizing the paper in order to appease Trump and protect his other, much larger, businesses. “Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post,” wrote former Post journalist Glenn Kessler in an essay this week. “He’s trying to survive Donald Trump.”

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” wrote Marty Baron, the legendary former editor of the Post, in a scathing statement responding to the cuts on Wednesday. Baron was hired to serve as the paper’s top editor months before Bezos bought it in 2013. Across his eight years in charge, when the Post cemented itself as a powerful force in Trump’s first term and earned 10 Pulitzer Prizes along the way, Baron enjoyed the full backing of the owner. In his 2023 book Collision of Power, he wrote that Bezos stood up to Trump’s attacks on the Post and resisted enormous pressure from the administration to rein in its coverage.

Now, Baron believes Bezos has succumbed to the more extreme pressures of Trump’s second term. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own,” he wrote in his statement. “This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

I called Baron up on Wednesday to try and get a better understanding of what’s happening at the Post, why Bezos stopped standing up for the paper, and what’s next for a free press under President Trump. This conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

Vanity Fair: Why did you feel the need to issue that statement?

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Marty Baron: I feel that this is an incredibly important moment in the history of The Washington Post. It’s a really dark day. I think the Post is dramatically diminishing its ambitions. I don’t think it’s serving the public with this decision. And I’m concerned that the owner, Jeff Bezos, is prioritizing his other businesses over The Washington Post. I fully understand that the whole media environment is dramatically different today than it was even a few years ago. So big changes are needed, but I don’t think this is the answer. And I think that the decisions that the owner and the publisher have made over the last several years have actually made things worse. And so I think it’s a tragedy. And I think I felt the need to speak out about it and not stay silent.

What do you make of the way that this was carried out? It doesn’t sound like Will Lewis was on the call.

Look, the newsroom is doing a fantastic job under very difficult circumstances. There have been a lot of people who have left, but there are a lot of really talented people who have remained at the Post. Sadly, they’re going to lose even more talented people as of today. On a decision of this sort, as dramatic as it is, the publisher should be on a call like that. He’s basically been an invisible publisher—not visible to people on the staff, not visible to the public, and not appearing on a Zoom when he’s announcing enormous cuts in the newsroom staff. To me, it’s part of the responsibility of a publisher to speak to the staff, particularly at moments like this one.

Do you have a sense of what the strategy is here? Glenn Kessler, who was at the Post for a number of years, wrote that, “Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post. He’s trying to survive Donald Trump.”

I do think he’s trying to survive Donald Trump, but I don’t think that’s the strategy with regard to The Washington Post. He’s certainly trying to navigate the Trump era and stay out of Trump’s crosshairs. He’s certainly trying to make sure that Amazon is not damaged by his ownership of The Washington Post. He’s certainly trying to make sure that Blue Origin is not damaged by his ownership of The Washington Post. Just the other day, he appeared with Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin, yucking it up, even though Pete Hegseth was the very person who asked for a raid on the home of one of the Post’s reporters where they seized all of her electronic devices. Even though Pete Hegseth was the one who ordered the expulsion of real reporters [who did not agree to his restrictions] from the Pentagon, including the Post’s own reporters.

I think he’s just decided that with regard to the strategy, that it just can’t be as big as it is, as simple as that. We’re just going to have to downsize. I hear through the grapevine that somehow they’re going to put some big emphasis on AI, although I think they may be deluding themselves as to what AI can actually do. I don’t know how AI cultivates sources. I don’t know how AI reports on what’s happening around the world. I don’t know how AI comes up with creative story ideas that will capture the interest of readers. I mean, certainly AI is a powerful tool and should be deployed, but it can’t replace reporters, and it can’t replace good editors either. [Editor’s note: In his memo, Murray said the Post is “still in the early days of AI-generated content, which is drastically reshaping user experiences and expectations.”]

We’ve spoken before about the support that Jeff Bezos gave you when you were the editor of the Post. What do you think has changed since?

Donald Trump. It was clear, when it appeared that Donald Trump would regain the White House, that’s when Jeff Bezos made the decision to not publish an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. Why poke the bear? Donald Trump had said all along that he was going to seek vengeance on his perceived political enemies. And I think that Bezos took him seriously, and understandably so, because guess what? Donald Trump has sought vengeance on his perceived political enemies, and Jeff Bezos was perceived as a political enemy for one reason and one reason only, and that was his ownership of The Washington Post.

And so after that, he took a series of steps that were clearly intended to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump. He appeared at the inauguration standing there on the podium in front of the Cabinet members. Amazon acquired the rights to Melania’s so-called documentary for an exorbitant price, and now they’re also spending an exorbitant sum of money toward distribution and promotion. Amazon also bought the rights to The Apprentice for a sum that we don’t even know yet. Trump said in his lawsuit against The New York Times that he got 50% of the profits of The Apprentice. So you have to assume that just about half of whatever Amazon is paying is going to be money in Donald Trump’s own pocket.

And then he also announced that he was going to change the Opinion page, including the editorial page, and he was going to exclude from those pages, essentially, people who didn’t buy into this ideology of free markets and individual liberties. Of course, he didn’t define that. But what it meant in practice was that anybody who was left of center, even slightly left of center, was going to be excluded from the Opinion pages of The Washington Post because they were evidently too critical of Donald Trump.

And even today, there’s absolutely no moral core to these editorials today. It’s not that they won’t criticize Trump from time to time, but they do so in the softest, most mealy-mouthed way. They always use it as an opportunity to also attack the Democrats. They’re constantly falling back on the phrase “overreach.” Well, it’s not overreach. It’s abuse of power. So with all of these decisions, from the decision not to publish a presidential endorsement to the remake of the Opinion pages—and particularly the remake of the editorials themselves—they’ve just driven away readers by the hundreds of thousands who are disgusted with what they’ve seen.

And so despite that fact, the newsroom, day in and day out, is just doing some tremendous work, and work that does hold the administration accountable. But it seems like with every reader they get in through the front door with great news coverage, they lose through the back door through these decisions that are being made by the owner, the publisher, and then also by the kinds of editorials that they seem to be running day after day.

So when Post leadership says the decline in audience is the result of a problem with the newsroom, the way you see it, it’s the leadership that is to blame for the decline in audience?

They had a lot of work to do. They had to make some changes too. I don’t think it’s the quality of the reporting, but I think it’s a matter of how we communicate with the public. The way that people consume news and information is dramatically changing. And so if the way people consume information is dramatically changing, then the way you deliver information has to change dramatically as well. And so clearly there were things that needed to be done. Perhaps even very disruptive things that needed to be done. That said, ownership and the publisher, I believe, made things infinitely worse with their decisions. I mean, you lose hundreds of thousands of loyal subscribers? It’s appalling.

The editorial page editor, in his couple of interviews that he did—he did one with Fox News, and he did one with [Reason Magazine], which tells you what kind of audience he’s trying to reach. He basically portrayed readers who had abandoned the Post as being partisan, that their readership of the Post was driven by partisanship. Well, it wasn’t. They saw a president who was likely to abuse his power, who was in fact abusing his power. They felt that the press needed to play an important role in holding this government or any government to account. They saw The Washington Post as doing that really well, so they supported the Post with their subscriptions. That is not partisanship. That is citizenship. The idea that the press should hold the government to account, that’s what the press ought to be doing, and it’s appropriate that people support that.

Are you worried about the broader implications that this has for press freedom under the Trump administration?

I am concerned about the press under this administration. The administration is putting enormous pressure on the press in every conceivable way, from threatening the networks with rescinding the licenses of television stations that are affiliated with them, to bringing totally baseless lawsuits, to raiding the home of a Washington Post reporter, to arresting independent journalists like Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. I’m really concerned about that. And I think that we need to have a very strong press in this country. My hope is that the Post will continue to do the kind of investigative reporting that it’s done to date. It’s been really good. It’s been very important, but the reality is that they’re going to have fewer resources to do that.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Marty Baron Warns That Jeff Bezos Is Shredding ‘The Washington Post’ to “Ingratiate Himself With Donald Trump” | Vanity Fair

Friday, February 6, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/02/friday-february-6-2026/

#childrapistelonmusk
#elonmusk
#jeffbezos

L'ignorance, c'est la force.
.
.
.
[Actualitte] - Le #WashingtonPost privé de ses critiques littéraires par #JeffBezos

Quand un milliardaire achète un journal, il est généralement plus motivé par des perspectives d'influence que par l'amour de l'information.

https://actualitte.com/article/129131/international/le-washington-post-prive-de-ses-critiques-litteraires-par-jeff-bezos

#RevueDePressse
#AmericanNightmare
#MediasDesOligaques

@randahl I wonder if #jeffBezos is doing what #elonmusk did with #twitter (for the Saudis) , basically to cripple it for his rich and poweful friends.

Negli ultimi mesi le vendite di #azioni da parte di #CEO #tech come #JeffBezos, #JensenHuang, #MichaelDell e #SundarPichai hanno attirato l’attenzione dei #mercati. Spesso si tratta di vendite programmate o di diversificazione, non di sfiducia nel #business. Tuttavia, quando più #dirigenti vendono nello stesso periodo e dopo forti rialzi, il segnale percepito è di prudenza. In mercati già volatili, questi movimenti possono incidere sulla fiducia degli investitori.
@economia
@attualita

“L’operazione Melania si distingue per l’appariscenza della corruzione”
Luca Celada, dal "manifesto",
28 gen. 2026
Sabato, la sera del giorno in cui i commando di Ice hanno giustizia
https://differx.noblogs.org/2026/02/06/loperazione-melania-si-distingue-per-lappariscenza-della-corruzione/
#ricostruzioni #adulatori #Amazon #Amerika #CasaBianca #corruzione #documentario #IlManifesto #JeffBezos #LucaCelada #MelaniaTrump #Minneapolis #oligarchia #servilismo #StatiUniti #Trump #USA

Jeff Bezos krijgt kinderbijslag omdat de arme man te weinig inkomsten heeft.
Een beter voorbeeld om niet de inkomstenbelasting te verhogen, maar de vermogensbelasting kan ik niet bedenken.

@D66 pas ajb je coalitieakkoord aan!
#jeffbezos #taxthesuperrich #vermogensbelasting

@janhoglund

This is just 🤡🤡🤡

#bezos #jeffbezos #satire

The Washington Post-Mortem. Today's cartoon by Antonio Rodríguez. More cartoons: https://www.cartoonmovement.com/

#WashingtonPost #JeffBezos #journalism #DemocracyDiesInDarkness #Trump

The Washington Post Is No Longer Useful to Jeff Bezos

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.404media.co/the-washington-post-is-no-longer-useful-to-jeff-bezos/

Update from the Dept. of Fuck #JeffBezos https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/05/amazon-ai-robotics-bezos-washington-post?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us