Barack Obama’s administration threatened reporters with jail if they refused to turn over their confidential sources. But he didn’t order raids on reporters’ homes. Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.
Back in 2012, I wrote an opinion piece for The Huffington Post (now just HuffPost) that I headlined “Obama’s War on Journalism.” The premise was that Barack Obama, like George W. Bush and other presidents before him, was disrespecting the First Amendment’s protection of independent journalism by taking reporters to court and theatening them with jail if they didn’t reveal the identities of White House sources leaking to them.
At least Obama, Bush et al. were following a legal process. As The Associated Press reports, Donald Trump’s FBI, headed by the buffoonish but dangerous Kash Patel, raided the home of a Washington Post journalist to grab what they claimed were classified documents provided by a Pentagon contractor.
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.
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.
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.
It’s important at a historical moment like this to keep our heads about us. Social media was filled with dark warnings about authoritarianism on Friday after the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan and charged her with illegally helping an undocumented immigrant avoid being detained by federal agents. I even saw a quote attributed to Hitler.
We should leave it to the legal system to determine whether Judge Dugan broke the law or not. But, to their credit, a number of news organizations noted that the Dugan case is remarkably similar to that of Massachusetts District Court Judge Shelley Joseph. Joseph was charged by federal authorities in 2019 with obstruction of justice after she helped an undocumented immigrant escape out the back of her courtroom when she learned that the feds were waiting to take him into custody.
Charges against Joseph were dropped in 2022 after she agreed to a state investigation into her conduct. As of late 2024, her case was still wending its way through the disciplinary system.
Ruth Marcus. 2017 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I don’t necessarily feel obliged to chronicle every rung that The Washington Post hits on the way down to wherever it ultimately lands. But there were three developments this week that I thought were worth taking note of as we ponder owner Jeff Bezos’ strange, dispiriting journey into MAGA-land.
1. Another resignation. Ruth Marcus resigned from the opinion section following publisher Will Lewis’ cancellation of a column she wrote criticizing Bezos’ edict that the section will henceforth be devoted to “personal liberties and free markets.”
Marcus, a moderate who is a former deputy editor of the section, is a lifer, unflashy and unpretentious. In a way, for such a core member of the Post to decide she’d had enough is even more disturbing than it is to lose someone with more of a following who can easily slide over to The New York Times, The Atlantic or Substack.
Writing in The New Yorker, she confirms something I suspected — that she’d already pretty much decided to resign and wrote her column with an eye toward leaving in a blaze of glory. She includes the text of the column, and, as she notes, it is mild and restrained. She knew it would likely be killed, but she says she wrote it with an eye toward having it appear in the Post.
She also tells us that Bezos, despite compiling a stellar record of strength and independence from the time he bought the Post until a little more than a year ago, nevertheless gave off some warning signals along the way. Even as he was publicly standing up to Donald Trump during Trump’s first term, he was also pushing the opinion section to find a few good things to say about him. Not a big deal at the time, but ominous in retrospect.
“I wish we could return to the newspaper of a not so distant past,” Marcus writes. “But that is not to be, and here is the unavoidable truth: The Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not The Washington Post I left.”
2. Titanic, deck chairs, etc. Even as Bezos transforms the Post into a laughingstock (not the news section, I should point out, though few readers draw that distinction), Lewis and executive editor Matt Murray continue to make plans that they hope will connect with readers more effectively than the current product. I wish I could think of a more original metaphor than rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic, but that’s what comes to mind.
Axios media reporter Sara Fischer writes that the paper will divide its national desk in two. One part of it will focus on non-political national reporting, and the other will be devoted exclusively to politics and government. The Post has struggled for years to appeal to readers whose primary interest is something other than politics, and that has a lot to do with its circulation slide and mounting losses following Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
By contrast, the Times continues to grow and prosper, largely on the strength of its lifestyle brands. The Post is stuck not just with a politics-centric audience, but with an audience that it’s alienated through Bezos’ high-handed moves, starting with his cancellation of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election.
“I want to make sure there are a few areas that are equally staffed and strong to make sure we’re always putting a strong foot forward and that we’re not just the politics paper, even though that’s important to who we are,” Murray told Fischer.
Frankly, I doubt it will work. What might work is an idea that Lewis floated some months back to publish local newsletters for an extra subscription fee that would serve the chronically undercovered metro Washington area. But now you have to wonder how well that would be received with The Washington Post brand on it.
3. Uncomfortable praise. Bezos must have been so proud Tuesday when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went out of her way to praise the Post.
“It appears that the mainstream media, including the Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this president does not help you sell newspapers,” Leavitt was quoted as saying. “It’s not a very good business model.”
As media reporter Oliver Darcy noted, it’s not likely that Leavitt had the newsroom restructing in mind. “Instead,” he wrote, “one imagines she was probably applauding Bezos’ push to shift the opinion section to the right.”
Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
I was hoping that Jeff Bezos had gotten it out of his system. After his disastrous decision to cancel The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, which cost the paper some 250,000 subscriptions, and his subsequent sucking up to Donald Trump, the billionaire had been quiet recently.
The news section’s coverage of the calamitous Trump White House has been excellent, and the Post’sdeputy managing editor, Mike Semel, has said that subscriber conversions “are strong and growing at a near-record pace,” according to media reporter Oliver Darcy.
But it was too good to be true. New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin reports (gift link) that opinion editor David Shipley is quitting after Bezos issued an edict calling for the section to go full MAGA. No longer will the Post offer a heterodox opinion section of liberals, moderates and conservatives. Rather, it will be more like The Wall Street Journal’s ultraconservative opinion section, only (I’ll predict) not as smart. Mullin writes:
“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said, in an email to The Post’s employees on Wednesday. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”
In his note, Mr. Bezos said that he asked Mr. Shipley whether he wanted to stay at The Post, and Mr. Shipley declined.
“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Mr. Bezos wrote.
You can read the full text of Bezos’ message on Mullin’s Bluesky feed.
Shipley had to endure the embarrassment of the Harris non-endorsement and then took one for the team when he killed an Ann Telnaes cartoon mocking Bezos and other corporate titans as they groveled at Trump’s feet. Shipley’s reasoning at the time — that there had already been enough of such opinionating — was disingenuous, and Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner, quit. But Shipley is standing tall today.
I have to assume this will set off a mass exodus from the Post’s opinion section. Good thing that Jonathan Capehart survived the purge at MSNBC that claimed Joy Reid.
A few random observations:
• Bezos says, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Hmmm … personal liberties and free markets? If Bezos is serious, then that would mean the new Post opinion section will be deeply anti-Trump: opposed to tariffs and in favor of reproductive and LGBTQ rights. But of course that’s not what he means. He’s adopting the up-is-down rhetoric of the MAGA movement.
• Bezos explicitly rejects the idea of a heterodox opinion section, arguing that it’s not necessary because “the internet does that job.” For years, the Post’s opinion section has been center-right, with a few liberals and a few Trumpers. Now The New York Times stands alone of the three major national papers in offering something close to the full spectrum. It’s kind of the mirror image of what the Post had been up until now — that is, the Times has been center-left, with a few conservatives but no Trump supporters.
• Does Bezos want the Post’s news pages to continue as tough, fair, independent truth-seekers with no interference from the owner? That’s how it works at the Journal, whose news pages continue to kick butt despite the right-wing opinion section and despite Murdoch ownership. Bezos was a very good steward of the Post from the time he bought it in 2013 until about a year ago, when he hired Fleet Street veteran and former Murdoch executive Will Lewis as publisher and kept him on even as questions about Lewis’ ethics mounted. I’m hoping for the best from the Post’s news section, but I’m bracing for the worst.
Washington Post publisher Will Lewis. 2019 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The ongoing implosion of The Washington Post is unfolding at a moment when we’ve never been more in need of tough, independent journalism. The latest, as Sara Fischer reports for Axios, is that Phil Rucker is leaving as the Post’s national editor in order to become senior vice president of editorial strategy and news at CNN.
It seems that anyone who can leave the Post is doing so now that billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has thrown in with Donald Trump. I don’t blame people for staying; after all, jobs in journalism are hard to come by, and there’s still reason to hope the paper’s news reporters will be allowed to do good work. Still, Bezos has done incalculable harm over the past year following a decade of model ownership; I wrote about the first years of his reign in my 2018 book, “The Return of The Moguls.” What’s happening now is depressing.
Before I get back to the Post, a word about CNN, about which there is reason to worry and reason to be hopeful. On the one hand, you have to be concerned about independent media reporter Oliver Darcy’s story Tuesday evening that chief executive Mark Thompson had told his staff before the inauguration that he wanted them not to dwell on the past. Darcy writes:
The next day, the network executed as directed…. CNN’s journalists entirely avoided pointing out during special inauguration coverage various inconvenient truths, such as the fact Trump is the first convicted felon to take office or that he was impeached for his role in inciting an insurrection on the very place he took his second oath. It was a glaring omission, but not one by accident.
On the other hand, Thompson is the guy who, in his previous job, revived The New York Times’ fortunes, transforming the newspaper into a growing, profitable digital powerhouse not just on the strength of its journalism but through ancillary products such as games, consumer advice and food. And he somehow convinced an outstanding news leader like Rucker that CNN is a better place to be right now than The Washington Post.
About which: As I was getting ready to write this item, the Post’s Karla Adam reported (gift link) that Rupert Murdoch’s British publishing empire had settled an invasion-of-privacy suit brought by Prince Harry for more than $10 million and an apology. Adam writes:
As part of the deal, Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) issued a formal apology, which was read out in court by Harry’s lawyer David Sherborne, conceding “unlawful activities” carried out by private investigators working for Murdoch’s newspapers, including “phone hacking, surveillance and misuse of private information.”
Scan down further into the story and you’ll come across this:
An executive summary of the claimants’ arguments, shared with The Washington Post before the settlement, indicated that Harry and [Labour Party politician Tom] Watson’s legal teams planned to allege that “over 30 million emails were deliberately destroyed” as part of a scheme to keep evidence from police investigators. The document asserted that “a pivotal role” in directing the email deletions had been played by former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, still a senior executive for Murdoch, and former NGN general manager William Lewis, now publisher and CEO of The Washington Post.
Both Brooks and Lewis have denied allegations of wrongdoing. NGN has acknowledged that emails were removed, but said that was part of a planned system migration and a new data retention policy, and that additional instructions were given to preserve emails potentially relevant to a police investigation.
The problems at the Post may have come to public attention starting with Bezos’ stunning decision last fall to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris with just days to go before the election. But the downward spiral really began with the appointment of Lewis to replace outgoing publisher Fred Ryan, and with Bezos’ stubborn insistence on sticking with Lewis despite embarrassing revelations about his involvement in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, who broke the news about Lewis’ involvement earlier this year, revisited that issue on Tuesday after reports of a settlement were circulating but before it was consummated. Though Folkenflik was careful to note that Lewis was “not a defendant in the case, and has denied all wrongdoing,” he added:
The plaintiffs allege that Lewis and the other executives orchestrated the deletion of millions of emails and withheld other material from police. According to police notes presented in court filings, Lewis told a police investigation they had to delete the emails to head off a scheme by Watson and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to get materials surreptitiously from Brooks’ computer.
Brown and Watson have denied any such plot; News UK has not to date produced any evidence publicly to support its existence. Brown has demanded a criminal investigation from Scotland Yard, which opened a preliminary review to determine whether a full investigation is warranted.
Former Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, now a contributor to The Guardian, wrote last Friday that Bezos needs to act quickly in order to save the Post. Her recommendations: hold an on-the-record meeting with the staff; make it clear that “he understands the importance of editorial freedom and pledge not to interfere with it”; and fire Lewis.
I wonder if it might be too late, though Sullivan’s advice would at least represent a dramatic break with the way Bezos has run the Post over the past year. My preference, given his unimaginable wealth, is that donate the Post to a nonprofit foundation and endow it, as the late Gerry Lenfest did with The Philadelphia Inquirer did in 2016.
Clearly, though, Bezos has to do something. Actually, let me revise that: He doesn’t have to do a damn thing. But I’m ever hopeful that he will.
In the latest sign that The Washington Post has lost its way, the paper’s acting executive editor killed a story reporting that managing editor Matea Gold had left to take a job at The New York Times.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that Matt Murray intervened and ordered that a story on Gold’s departure be deep-sixed. Now, this is all very complicated. Murray, who was brought in earlier this year by the Post’s ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, replaced Sally Buzbee after she quit rather than move over to head a “third newsroom” initiative that Lewis has talked about but has not really explained. (Buzbee recently was named to a top editing job at Reuters.)
Murray, in turn, is supposed to run the third newsroom after the Post chooses a new, permanent executive editor — and Gold, a respected insider, was thought to be a candidate for that position. But now Murray himself, who’s proved to be popular inside the newsroom (at least until this week), may want to stay right where he is; independent media reporter Oliver Darcy wonders if Murray killed the story about Gold’s departure in order to curry favor with Lewis. Adding to the intrigue is that Lewis was also Murray’s boss when they both worked at The Wall Street Journal. Continue reading “At The Washington Post, silence is Gold; plus, a bad day for Rupe and Lachlan, and cuts at Stat News”
The problem with good billionaire newspaper owners is that they can turn into bad billionaire newspaper owners, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. This morning I bring you two disturbing data points about owners who had already put us on notice that their days of responsible stewardship were receding into the past.
First up: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who has owned The Washington Post since 2013. Now, as I have written here on multiple occasions, Bezos was a sterling owner up until a couple of years ago, providing the legendary paper with money and independence as well as standing up to Donald Trump throughout the 2016 campaign and his first term as president. I wrote admiringly of his ownership in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” and no, I wouldn’t take any of it back.
But Bezos lost his way sometime after Marty Baron retired as executive editor in 2021. Baron’s replacement, longtime Associated Press editor Sally Buzbee, was fine, but Bezos may have been intimidated by Baron into not indulging his worst instincts, and that ended with Baron’s departure.
Bezos’ next move was to hire British tabloid veteran Will Lewis as his publisher and to stick with him even after it was revealed that Lewis’ ethics were so compromised that his behavior has attracted the attention of Scotland Yard. Buzbee left rather than accept what looked like a demotion. The current executive editor, Matt Murray, has reportedly won the respect of the newsroom, but he’s supposed to be a temporary hire and is slated to move over to some sort of ill-defined “third newsroom” initiative. Continue reading “Billionaire bash: More bad omens from the owners of The Washington Post and the LA Times”
