Jeff Bezos: cutting the legs off The Washington Post

The Washington Post was, until recently, among the US’s most venerable papers, said Jill Abramson in The Boston Globe. Its reporting on the Watergate scandal under the legendary editor Ben Bradlee made history; the reporters responsible, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, have inspired generations of journalists since; the paper’s writers and photographers were admired the world over.

‘Mortal wound’

Alas, the Post today is a shadow of that former self, and last week it announced that it is laying off more than 300 people – a third of its already pared-back staff. Its ranks of local and international reporters are being decimated, and the sports and books sections are to close. This is not a cut. It is “a mortal wound”. And nor should it be mistaken for a “media story”, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. These layoffs will leave “the capital of the most powerful nation on Earth” without a major newspaper – and “during the Trump administration no less”.

“It sucks when your job gets blown up,” said Scott McKay in The American Spectator. But let’s face it: the Post’s glory days are long over. The paper lost $77 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024. Last year its weekday print circulation fell below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years, said John R. Puri in National Review. The companies that own The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, are making record profits. You can’t blame Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million, for rationalising the business. If all those fulminating about these cuts had actually read the output of the Post’s now-unemployed journalists, they’d still have their jobs.

Accelerated decline

Bezos isn’t bothered about the Post’s operating losses, said Alex Kirshner on Slate. With a net worth of $240 billion, he could sustain them for “hundreds of lifetimes”. When he bought the paper, he made much of the fact that he wasn’t driven purely by a profit motive. But latterly, he seems to have used his ownership of the Post to appease Donald Trump and so boost the fortunes of his other interests, such as Amazon and Blue Origin.

He stepped in to stop the paper endorsing Kamala Harris for president – a decision that cost it 250,000 subscribers. He shifted the paper’s opinion section to be more pro-Trump; he made not a squeak of protest when the FBI recently raided the home of a Post reporter, seizing her devices. Bezos hasn’t just presided over the Post’s decline; he’s deliberately accelerated it, for the sake of “his own bottom line”.