The Washington Post’s increasingly Trump-friendly editorial page has rediscovered its soul, however briefly.
In a piece published Tuesday afternoon, the Post tears into Donald Trump for his friendly White House get-together with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, according to a CIA intelligence assessment, was behind the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident (and Post columnist) Jamal Khashoggi.
The editorial is unsigned, which means that it represents the institutional voice of the newspaper, including its owner, Jeff Bezos. Better still, The New York Times reports that Bezos was not among the tech moguls who attended Trump’s dinner for bin Salman, even though others were there — including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Dell’s Michael Dell, Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, Elon Musk and others.
Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, there were fears that he would position its editorial pages to boost his various business interests and amplify his quirky political philosophy.
Consider, for example, Shel Kaphan, an engineer who was Amazon’s first employee and later had a falling-out with Bezos. “It makes me feel quite nauseous,” Kaphan told the Post immediately after the purchase was announced. “I’d hate to see the newspaper converted into a corporate libertarian mouthpiece.”
Contrary to Kaphan’s fears, Bezos proved to be an exemplary owner for 10 years. Then, in late 2023 he hired the ethically challenged Fleet Street veteran Will Lewis as his publisher, and it’s been all downhill since then.
Particularly damaging has been Bezos’ assault on the Post’s opinion section, which began with his decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 presidential election. That was followed by the exodus of key employees, Bezos’ pronouncement that the opinion section would be reoriented to emphasize “free markets and personal liberties,” and the hiring of the conservative journalist Adam O’Neal to be opinion editor.
Now comes yet another disturbing development in the Post opinion section’s race to the bottom. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that, on three occasions in recent weeks, the Post has editorialized in favor of Bezos’ business interests without making any disclosure — a violation of basic journalistic ethics. As Folkenflik observes:
For the newspaper’s owner to have outside business holdings or activities that might intersect with coverage or commentary is conventionally seen to present at the least a perception of a conflict of interest. Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency.
The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past, whether the Graham family’s holdings, which included the Stanley Kaplan educational company and Slate magazine, or, since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper’s reporters do so as a matter of routine.
The three undisclosed conflicts, by the way, involved a rousing endorsement of Donald Trump’s hideous ballroom, for which Amazon was a major corporate donor; support for the military’s bid to build nuclear reactors, which could bolster another Amazon investment; and a piece urging local officials in Washington to approve self-driving cars. Amazon’s autonomous car company, Zoox, had just announced that it would be moving into the nation’s capital.
Folkenflik noted that in the case of the ballroom to replace the now-demolished East Wing, the Post added a disclosure after its initial publication — but only after being called on it by Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin.
It’s not at all unusual for media moguls to have a variety of entangling business interests. The solution, without exception, is to disclose those conflicts whenever they are being reported on or editorialized about. The Boston Globe, for instance, rarely fails to disclose John and Linda Henry’s ownership of the Red Sox and their other sports-related interests when reporting on them as business enterprises.
To borrow Shel Kaphan’s description, it is nauseating to watch Bezos destroy his legacy as a first-rate newspaper owner by turning the Post’s opinion section into a pathetic joke. It has cost the Post tens of thousands of readers, and media reporter Natalie Korach of Status reports writes the staff is preparing for a painful round of cuts just before the holidays.
But Bezos doesn’t care. His interests are elsewhere. I just wish the world’s fourth-richest person would donate the Post to a nonprofit foundation so that he can cease being, as he’s put it, “not an ideal owner” of one of our great newspapers.
George W. Bush in 2001. Public domain photo via the U.S. National Archives.
FCC chair Brendan Carr’s thuggish threat to crack down on media companies following late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk differed from past instances only in that he said it out loud.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an appearance on a right-wing podcaster’s show. And Disney, Nexstar and Sinclair, all of which have significant regulatory issues before the FCC, wasted no time in making sure that Kimmel was banished from ABC’s airwaves.
Trump himself put it even more bluntly, saying that broadcasters who are “against me” should lose their licenses, reported Zoë Richards of NBC News.
The first comparison that comes to mind, naturally, is Richard Nixon’s threat in 1973 to take away the licenses of two Florida television stations owned by The Washington Post amid the paper’s dogged reporting on the Watergate scandal. “The difference here is that Nixon talked about the scheme only privately,” the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote about the scheme many years later.
Globe Opinion’s original headline. It was later changed to “Charlie Kirk murder: America needs dialogue, not bullets” online and “An attack on democracy” in print.
Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham has quit the paper’s editorial board in protest over last week’s editorial (sub. req.) praising the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s commitment to free speech — an editorial that was widely derided by critics who objected to Kirk’s often hateful rhetoric. Graham will remain as a columnist and will continue to write her Globe newsletter, Outtakes.
Graham confirmed those developments in an email exchange but would not offer any further comment.
A Globe spokesperson said of Graham’s decision: “We are grateful to Renée Graham for her valuable contributions to our team and to the editorial board. We respect her decision to resign from the board and are pleased that she will continue in her role as a Globe Opinion associate editor, columnist, and newsletter writer.”
Kirk was murdered during an appearance at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. It’s been the top story in the news ever since given the public nature of his death (including a graphic video), the devotion of his millions of followers (Donald Trump and JD Vance among them), and his comments targeting Black women, members of the LGBTQ community, immigrants and others.
As best as I can determine, in the 11 months since The Washington Post’s opinion section descended into Jeff Bezos-imposed turmoil, no one had been fired — until now. Some people quit in protest, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, or because they disagreed with Bezos’ mandate to focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets,” such as opinion editor David Shipley. But Karen Attiah is the first to lose her job.
Attiah, who had been a columnist for the Post, took to her Substack newsletter on Monday to announce that she had been sacked for a series of posts on Bluesky in which she condemned gun violence following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday. By her own account, her only post even mentioning Kirk was this one, quoting Kirk’s own words:
“Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot”. -Charlie Kirk
Some have argued that Kirk’s quote had been taken out of context because he was referring to specific Black women and was characterizing what others were saying, as David Gilmour writes at Mediaite. To which I would observe that Kirk’s quotes and what he meant are sometimes difficult to parse. Attiah is hardly the only journalist who may have misconstrued something that he said.
Attiah, noting that she was the Post’s last remaining full-time Black columnist, wrote:
My commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.
And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation — claiming disparagement on race. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.
Media reporter Oliver Darcy obtained (sub. req.) a copy of the letter in which Attiah was fired, from human resources head Wayne Connell, who claimed that she had disparaged white men. Connell’s letter begins with this:
I am writing to inform you that The Post is terminating your employment effective immediately for gross misconduct. Your public comments on social media regarding the death of Charlie Kirk violate The Post’s social media policies, harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff.
Of course, taking to social media in the immediate aftermath of a tragic event such as the Kirk assassination is fraught with danger. Opinion journalists, though, should be able to post freely as long as they maintain the same tone they would be expected to adhere to in their day job. Attiah’s posts on Bluesky were certainly provocative, but they strike me as being well within the bounds of what is acceptable.
Then again, this may have amounted to a convenient excuse to get rid of a troublesome internal critic. Darcy reported last month (sub. req.) that Attiah had a tense meeting with the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, and declined to take a buyout that was being offered even though O’Neal was trying to push out anyone whose work “work didn’t align with his vision for the section.”
Poynter Online media columnist Tom Jones reports that the Post’s union issued a statement condemning Attiah’s firing “and will continue to support her and defend her rights.” What form that support may take is not specified.
Meanwhile, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter writes that Attiah’s newsletter, The Golden Hour, gained 10,000 new subscribers in the immediate aftermath of her post about having been fired. Then, too, Matthew Dowd, fired by MSNBC last week after he said “hateful words lead to hateful thoughts lead to hateful actions” while commenting on Kirk’s murder, is also promoting his Substack newsletter, Lighthouse Sentinel.
We are in the midst of a right-wing backlash, led by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are using Kirk’s tragic death as an opportunity to punish their critics. As the BBC notes, “Pilots, medical professionals, teachers and one Secret Service employee are among those who have been suspended or sacked for social media posts that were deemed inappropriate about Kirk’s death.”
Of course, no one should be celebrating Kirk’s death, which was a tragedy for his family and friends. But for the MAGA movement to use it as an opportunity to unleash a witch hunt against their opponents is as sickening as it is predictable. I don’t think this is going to blow over any time soon.
Because Jeff Bezos has taken a wrecking ball to The Washington Post’s opinion section, critics have become sensitive to any hint that the billionaire owner is paying obeisance to Donald Trump.
Which brings me to an op-ed the Post published Tuesday evening (gift link) by newly confirmed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro about Trump’s decision to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., in order to crack down on a crime wave that, by all credible accounts, does not exist. I haven’t been able to find any media commentary criticizing the Post for running Pirro’s piece, but I have seen grumbling on social media along with yet another round of vows by readers to cancel their subscriptions.
Deciding whether to run such a piece is not just a journalistic decision but also an ethical one. Pirro’s major qualification for her job as D.C.’s top prosecutor is having served as a Trump-worshipping talk-show host on Fox News, although it has to be said that she served as both a prosecutor and a judge many years ago. Her op-ed defends an authoritarian president who is militarizing the nation’s capital just because he can. Should the Post have just said no?
The Post itself editorialized against her appointment (gift link) back in May. Part of the paper’s objection was over process, but the editorial also called out her judgment and noted that her executive producer at Fox News had referred to her as a “reckless maniac” in promoting the voting-machine conspiracy that led to a $787.5 million libel settlement by her then-employer.
Which is to say that the Post’s editorial board, compromised though it may be, saw fit to stand up to Pirro and Trump as recently as three months ago. No doubt the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, decided to run Pirro’s op-ed for the most ordinary of reasons: it was submitted (if not necessarily written) by a high-ranking government official with responsibility for a significant issue in the news.
In that regard, it’s useful to remember the mess over The New York Times’ decision to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton back in 2020 in which Cotton endorsed the use of military force to crush violent Black Lives Matter protesters. As I wrote for GBH News, the Times shouldn’t have run the piece for several reasons. Among other things, the editors did not insist that Cotton address an earlier public statement he’d made suggesting that violent protesters should be killed on the streets, and he was allowed to make an entirely unsubstantiated assertion that antifa was involved in the protests.
We later learned that editorial-page editor James Bennet hadn’t even bothered to read Cotton’s screed before publishing it. Bennet, whose miscues were piling up (including his inserting a false assertion into an editorial that led to Sarah Palin’s endless libel suit against the Times), was soon fired.
Pirro’s op-ed strikes me as unremarkable right-wing boilerplate about what she describes as a need to crack down on youthful offenders. She calls on the D.C. Council to amend or reverse three laws that would strip those offenders of important rights and protections. The op-ed says in part:
Unfortunately, young criminals have been emboldened to think they can get away with committing crime in this city, and, very often, they do. But together with our local and federal partners, our message to them today is: We will identify you, prosecute you and convict you. For any juveniles: We are going to push to change the laws so that if you commit any violent crime, I have jurisdiction to prosecute you where you belong — in adult court.
Don’t get me wrong. This is terrible, vile stuff, but the question is whether the Post should have run her op-ed. I think the answer is yes. It’s a newsworthy piece by a public official who’s close to the president. If I were editing the piece, I would have insisted that she address the falling crime rate in D.C. (As a general principle, I think editorial-page editors need to insist on standards of truthfulness and accuracy in outside contributions.) Overall, though, I don’t think Pirro’s piece is nearly as objectionable as Cotton’s was five years ago.
The Post, given its location in the nation’s capital, has always been a favored landing spot for op-eds by high-ranking government officials. The best way to have prevented Pirro’s op-ed from running would have been to keep Trump out of the White House. But it’s far too late for that.
Where is The Washington Post heading? Certainly from outside the paper’s walls, the situation looks grim, as staff members are streaming toward the exits in droves, especially but not exclusively from the opinion side. But as disgusted as I am by Jeff Bezos’ shift from model owner to boss from hell over the past couple of years, I’ve held out hope that all may not be lost — as long as he doesn’t mess with the news operation. So far, he hasn’t.
Which is why I want to call your attention to this Jon Allsop piece from the Columbia Journalism Review. He recounts the devastation in minute detail, but he offers more nuance than I’ve seen elsewhere. He also buries the lead. The key is his wrap-up:
[J]ournalism is more of a team sport than the industry focus on its stars sometimes acknowledges, and the Post is clearly retaining a corps of incredibly talented journalists. In their departure notes, [chief political reporter Dan] Balz and [sports columnist Sally] Jenkins both emphasized this fact, with the latter writing that she sees “the glimmer of a new Washington Post — one that moves”; it will have “to be right-sized,” she added, “and young trees planted, but when the clocks all start chiming at the same time, it will be glorious.” Chelsea Janes, who covers baseball for the Post, and is staying, reacted to news of Jenkins’s exit with a different metaphor — that of a sports team that has been torn apart for unclear reasons — but added that there’s “plenty of talent still on the roster, and everyone on that roster plays to win.” I can sympathize with Janes’s analogy: my English soccer team is currently in the process of a full-scale rebuild, and a lot about it sucks. But it also feels like a moment of opportunity. That is, if the owners and management know what they’re doing. The same is true in journalism.
The challenge is finding an audience for the Post now that Bezos’ feckless leadership has allowed the paper to be caricatured as a mouthpiece for Donald Trump, even though it’s not, and even though its news coverage remains superb. It also doesn’t help that he’s stuck with Will Lewis as his publisher despite Scotland Yard’s ongoing interest in Lewis’ possible involvement in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. I would love it if Bezos returned to the generous, hands-off owner I wrote about in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” but that’s not likely to happen.
Even so, we still have three great national newspapers — the Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. If the Journal can survive and thrive despite Murdoch family ownership (by the way, here’s a terrific profile of Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker by The Guardian’s Michael Savage), then the Post can overcome Bezos. That is, assuming Bezos wants it.
Media Nation on semi-hiatus
We’re heading out later today for the rest of the week, and I’m not planning on writing anything unless there’s huge media news. I’ll try to send out an abbreviated supporters newsletter sometime on Thursday. Behave yourselves.
Is Jonathan Capehart the most visible journalist to quit The Washington Post? With his roles on the “PBS NewsHour” and MSNBC, he is ubiquitous. And now he’s taken the buyout rather than stick around for whatever forced-optimism libertarian hell new opinion editor Adam O’Neal imposes on the opinion section that owner Jeff Bezos has destroyed.
It seems like it was only a matter of time once Bezos decided to take a wrecking ball to the operation, starting with his decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris right before the election. That was followed by other embarrassments, including the resignations of cartoonist Ann Telnaes after a drawing that mocked Bezos was nixed, of longtime Post stalwart Ruth Marcus and, finally, of opinion editor David Shipley after Bezos announced the section would be reoriented toward cheerleading for free-market capitalism.
Through it all, Capehart stuck with it, no doubt biding his time until the moment was right. There was one especially memorable moment when, during their weekly segment on the “NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks tore into Bezos while Capehart just sat there with a big grin. It was obviously rehearsed, with Brooks waiting until the end so that Capehart wouldn’t be put in the awkward position of having to respond. I wish I could find the segment, but I can’t remember when it happened.
I suspect Capehart will be plenty busy with his non-Post jobs, but I hope his writing pops up in another publication.
Back during the heady early years of the Jeff Bezos era at The Washington Post, the paper competed head to head with The New York Times for web traffic. Generally CNN would come in first, with the Times and the Post battling it out for second place. For instance, in April 2017 the Times recorded nearly 89.8 million unique visitors and the Post 78.7 million. Among news sites, they were outranked only by CNN.com, with 101.2 million.
But though the Times has thrived in the years following Trump’s first term, the Post has struggled, and has been in free fall since Bezos suddenly transformed himself from a model newspaper owner into the mogul from hell, starting with his decision last fall to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election.
The latest numbers from Similarweb, reported by Press Gazette, tell an ugly tale. The Times recorded 444.9 million unique visitors in May 2025, finishing first among U.S. news websites. CNN was second, with 311.7 million. And the Post was all the way back at 17th, with 72.2 million.
Most of the sites recorded a drop compared to 2024, but the Post’s decline was especially steep — down 24% versus just 8% at the Times. (CNN was down a whopping 28%.) The Post was only a little ahead of The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian and behind The Associated Press and Newsweek, which it once owned.
Last week I dismissed as irrelevant a steep decline in print circulation at the Post. The erosion of web traffic, though, is a much bigger deal. The goal is to sign up paid digital subscribers, and web traffic is how you get those subscribers. In business terms, those monthly visitors are at the top of the conversion funnel and paid customers are at the bottom. If there are fewer visitors to pull through the funnel, then there are fewer opportunities to sell them subscriptions.
As for the Times, we all know that its success in selling digital subscriptions has a lot to do with its non-news offerings such as games, food and consumer advice. That has nothing to do with raw web traffic, though. The reality is that dramatically more people are enticed to click on New York Times links to check out its journalism. Both the Times and the Post offer 10 gift links per month, yet five times as many people are accessing the Times compared to the Post.
Bezos has single-handedly transformed the Post from one of the newspaper business’ great success stories into a disaster. And he’s too rich to care.
Take, for a recent example, The Washington Post. Vince Morris of Washington City Paper reported last week that Metro, Sports and Style are going to be merged into one print section on most days, depriving residents of the DC area of a standalone section comprising local news. Morris called the announcement “grim,” even though he noted that executive editor Matt Murray said in a memo to readers that the move will not mean less coverage. Morris also writes:
According to data provided to City Paper by the Alliance for Audited Media, the Post’s paid average daily circulation is now down to just 97,000, with roughly 160,000 on Sundays. That’s a fraction of the 250,000 average daily circulation five years ago, when the Post was one of the largest newspapers in the country by circulation.
Piling on is Andy Meek of Forbes, who writes of those print numbers: “To put that in perspective: 97,000 is the sort of figure you’d expect to see from a mid-size regional paper like The Minnesota Star Tribune or The Seattle Times. Not from a globally recognized newsroom with multiple Pulitzers to its name.”
Now, it’s true that paid print has held up much better at The New York Times (244,000 on weekdays, 606,000 on Sundays) and The Wall Street Journal (449,000 on weekdays, 506,000 for its weekend edition). But print has long since ceased to matter. The Times, after all, has 11 million digital-only subscribers and the Journal has around 4 million.
And therein lies the true crisis for The Washington Post.
As Morris writes, the Post stopped reporting its paid digital circulation some time ago. Last fall, when owner Jeff Bezos began taking a wrecking ball to the paper’s opinion section by killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election, paid digital was thought to be around 2.5 million. About 200,000 vanished overnight. And who knows what it is today after further damage caused by high-profile resignations such as that of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes and Bezos’ announcement that he planned to transform the opinion pages into some sort of cheerleading free-market hellhole.
Bezos’ ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, has had exactly one good idea since he was hired in late 2023: to start a premium newsletter of local and regional coverage for readers who live in Washington and its suburbs. But if that’s ever been mentioned again, word of it somehow escaped me.
The Washington Post is in deep, deep trouble. After 10 years of sterling sterling stewardship, Bezos has transformed himself into the owner from hell, damaging the reputation of a still-great news organization that he did so much to build up.
Evidence of the destruction is all around. But you won’t find it in the paper’s irrelevant print circulation numbers.
