Reporting on a corrupt president made the Washington Post a global sensation with Watergate – and the masthead became a byword for fearless reporting. But last week the news organisation axed about 400 jobs, with some reporters discovering they were being laid off while still in war zones.
Media organisations face tough times with falls in advertising revenues and search traffic, and making cuts is not necessarily surprising. But with Jeff Bezos having bought the company, buying the rights to The Apprentice and making a lavishly produced documentary with Melania Trump, critics are asking whether politics, not profits, are really behind the move.
Marty Baron was executive editor at the paper during the period Bezos bought it, and when the organisation won 11 Pulitzers. He says the tech billionaire was engaged and supportive during Donald Trump’s first term as president. The scrapping of an endorsement of Kamala Harris during the 2024 election was a change in his previously hands-off approach. “Trump had promised retribution against his perceived political enemies throughout that campaign. And Bezos was perceived as a political enemy for one reason. And one reason only, and that was the coverage of the Washington Post.”
Jeremy Barr, the Guardian US’s media and power correspondent and a former employee at the Post, says Bezos obviously does not want to continue to lose money through the newspaper. But when he is wealthy enough to manage five years of losses with a week of his earnings, why can he not see the value of the paper, Nosheen Iqbal asks Barr. “I think that’s the sort of million-dollar question: why he can’t see this as a kind of public service endeavour in which he’s willing to take some losses for the benefit of the country and the world.”
