Billionaire Bezos guts Washington Post |
The gutting of the Washington Post has reignited a deeper question about who controls the media – and whether billionaire ownership is compatible with a free press.
The Washington Post announced massive cuts to its newsroom staff on Wednesday, unleashing a wave of disgust directed toward its owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
As reported by Semafor reporter Maxwell Tani, Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray told staffers at the paper that it would be closing its sports department “in its current form,” and would also be “killing its book section, suspending its Post Reports podcast, restructuring its metro section, and shrinking its international footprint.”
With hundreds of journalists expected to lose their jobs, Murray told Post employees that the cuts were needed to help the paper “become more essential to people’s lives” in “what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly,........