The Washington Post Is in Free Fall—and There’s One Person to Blame |
The Washington Post laid off more than 300 journalists today, including a huge chunk of its reporters covering international news, local news, and sports. It’s the latest stage in the slow-motion destruction of what had been one of most respected news organizations in the world, coming after owner Jeff Bezos infamously blocked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris on the eve of the 2024 election and, a few months later, shifted the paper’s opinion section to be much more pro-Trump.
What’s happening at the Post is a tragedy and a huge missed opportunity. And I don’t just say that just because I’m both a journalist and a former Post staffer. America desperately needs, more than any point in my lifetime, a robust news organization with hundreds of reporters and editors who are firmly committed to fairness and accuracy but also willing to be honest and forthright about the radicalism of Trump and the current Republican Party. A paper whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness” should be that outlet. But one man opposes that vision, and sadly, only Jeff Bezos’s opinion counts.
Let me start with that robustness, and why it’s so distressing to see it diminished. The Post laying off reporters is a different action than CBS News installing a right-wing ideologue (which is what Bari Weiss functionally is, though she would deny it) at the top of its news organization. But in some ways, the results are the same: the dismantling of crucial journalism infrastructures that can’t be easily replaced.
The Post and CBS not only have huge teams of journalists, but they have over decades built complicated systems to cover major stories and break news. So at the Post, complex stories often have two reporters; an editor who oversees the story and initially edits the piece; another editor or two who make further changes; a copy editor who reads each story super carefully for any factual or grammatical errors; and a lawyer........