Politics

For the past week, I’ve been unable to retrieve the copies of The Washington Post that usually get delivered to my home, since the brutal weather in the DC area has turned my front yard into an unfordable moat of frozen snow. This now seems a richly prophetic turn of events, since my hometown newspaper is being eviscerated under the disastrous ownership of centibillionaire monopolist and MAGA flunky Jeff Bezos.

Per a new report from The New York Times—cowritten by former Post media columnist Erik Wemple—the paper is initiating “a widespread round of layoffs.” Other outlets reported that at least a third of Post employees across business and editorial are being let go. In a Zoom call with the paper’s staff—one that neither Bezos nor his handpicked Post publisher Will Lewis deigned to attend—editor in chief Matt Murray announced that the Post’s sports section—a distinguished operation that formerly anchored a great deal of the paper’s market penetration in the mid-Atlantic—will be effectively dismantled, with a handful of staffers left to stoke a walking-dead version of it. Local news coverage—another historic strength of the paper, and one of the few coverage areas that cannot be easily replicated by other national titles—is also being gutted. The Post will also be shuttering its recently revived books section—where I worked as deputy editor in the early aughts. The paper’s daily news podcast will be deep-sixed, and its international desk is due to be hollowed out.

News of this impending bloodletting has been swirling around industry circles for weeks—so much so that foreign correspondents for the Post were reduced last week to publicly begging Bezos to save their jobs, and preserve the Post’s reputation as a serious news organization. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Bezos didn’t bother to reply and kept an arrogant oligarchic silence during the buildup to this gruesome journalistic dismemberment. Bezos also offered no comment when Post reporter Hannah Natanson had her devices seized by the FBI in the investigation of a series of leaks from a government contractor—an act of intimidation from a Trump White House waging sustained ideological war on the fourth estate. Bezos’s silence on these fundamental assaults on news-gathering underscores his complacent indifference to the civic value of journalism; his true priorities became clear amid the Post’s death watch when he stirred out of his state of public hibernation long enough to host Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who has overseen the complete ideological purging of the Pentagon press corps—at his space start-up Blue Origin, which holds billions of dollars in defense contracts.