Comes the terrible news this week that many saw coming weeks ago if not longer: Washington Post billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has moved to decimate that once-great newspaper, firing a third of the staff and effectively jettisoning its local, regional and international news coverage, not to mention its sports coverage and book reviews.
The Post’s demise since Bezos’ acquisition was sealed in November 2024 when Bezos ordered its editors to kill an editorial endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The egregious move led to countless subscription cancellations from rightfully angry readers such that the few left have had to pay over $800 a year for its home delivery.
Still, the latest news is shocking and demoralizing. It follows right after news of the death of another treasured Washington, D.C. institution, the Kennedy Center.
Again, it was the stunning vandalism perpetrated by President Trump more directly, in this case, when the exterior of the great memorial to President Kennedy was defaced with Trump’s name, and long-time lovers of the musical and theatrical offerings there were compelled to protest with their feet. The huge loss of revenue that resulted has now caused Trump, in a peak of anger, to shut the place down completely (for renovations, he contends).
Credit Trump with both acts of wanton civic destruction. He pressed the spineless Bezos into demolishing The Post, which began when Bezos hired British rightwinger Will Lewis as its publisher.
“As a business decision, the hire made no sense. Lewis was a disgraced Brit with no experience in American media and no track record of success in digital publishing. He was a reliable hack, though: He would do whatever he was told and clearly he had been told to make the paper friendlier to Donald Trump, no matter the cost,” as The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last put it. Yesterday, Last came up with the apt headline, “The Washington Post Dies in Daylight.”
Sadly, it was a reference to The Post’s popular slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which, ironically, former Post editor Marty Baron said in his memoir that Bezos had a personal hand in crafting in his early days there.
Yesterday, Baron posted online that Bezos now is unrecognizable from when he first took over the paper. Back in the day, “Bezos,” Baron wrote, ”often declared that The Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life. I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it,” he wrote.
“Yes,” Baron wrote, The Post has “acute business problems.” But those challenges “were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top.” Subscribers “were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands,” Baron added, citing the axed endorsement, “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor” with Trump, and other factors.
Former Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote in a recent column, “Bezos is not trying to save The Post. Trimming the Post’s sails sends a message to an audience of one.”
Congressman Don Beyer, who lives in The Post’s distribution area in Northern Virginia, wrote, “ I think I speak for many in our region when I say it is heartbreaking to watch Jeff Bezos run the Washington Post into the ground.”
But, on the upside, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote this week, “One of the biggest political lessons I learned covering the Middle East for four-plus decades is that there is only one good thing about extremists: They don’t know when to stop. As a result, they eventually go too far and drive themselves over a cliff.”
Friedman added, “I think many Americans are growing both exhausted and frightened by Trump’s scorched-earth, hyperpartisan, fire-ready-aim approach to the presidency, in which he’s been treating Democrats not as political opponents but as “traitors,” wiping out Democrats from previously bipartisan boards, slapping his name on the Kennedy Center ahead of JFK’s and lately even accusing President Barack Obama of “treason” — to name just a few of his inflammatory, divisive actions.
“I think a lot of Americans are tired of being pitted against their neighbors and hunger to be brought together for a common purpose; they want common-sense solutions and to preserve our most cherished public institutions.”
