"It sucks for people in the DMV" For anyone else who wondered why Dan was so worried about people in line at the Dept of Motor Vehicles, it's apparently also a nickname for the DC/Maryland/Virginia area.
Recently I read "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine and his observation here seems appropos:“The more men have to lose, the less willing are they to venture. The rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a Spaniel.”
Even so, not all wealthy people make these kinds of horrid choices. I'll forever be fascinated by what drives those differences.
I too am saddened by the demise of the WaPo. I was a loyal subscriber for the better part of 30 years. I stuck it out for a while as Bezos and Lewis did their worst. It was the Harris endorsement that finally made me drop my subscription. Democracy simply dies.
Very sad. Kate Graham must be spinning in her grave. I hope the departed talent of the Washington Post organize a new, successful and economically viable media company.
I remember corresponding with Dean Baquet (NYT executive editor) during Trump's first term, expressing my disappointment with the Times' pallid coverage and flat tonality during a time that was more fraught than many now, in the glare of Trump 2.0's shock and awe, seem to remember. I held up WaPo to Dean as an alternative model -- the writing was deeper, more compelling, more real. The Times, by comparison, felt washed out, almost perfunctory.
Then Bezos dumps Mackenzie, hooks up with Lauren, starts pumping iron and wearing shades, goes full-on BMOC oligarch, and nuzzles up to Trump. I guess you can see it as an epic midlife crisis. But at what terrible cost. And another installment of "Everything Trump Touches Dies: The Movie." Unfortunately, we're all extras.
Thank you, Dan, for writing this. I moved to DC thirty years ago, and raised a family here. The Post is our hometown paper. I kept my subscription longer than I should have, holding on even after Bezos spiked the Harris endorsement, because I couldn't imagine navigating my life in this city without the Post. But it's not the Post anymore. The Post is gone. Reading this, combined with Ashley Parker's moving piece in the Atlantic yesterday, underscore what this community--my community--has had robbed from them by Jeff Bezos. The news coming on the same day that the GOP House voted to gut DC's tax code (H.J.RES. 142, look it up) only underscores for me that no one is going to save DC except the people of DC, that nothing less than FULL STATEHOOD is the solution, and that America's democracy is weaker when we here in DC continue to be second-class citizens. I know I'm stretching this a bit beyond talking about modern American media, but my feelings are raw, and--in this moment--I can't help but feel it all as linked.
This is a good overview of the Washington Post's decline, but it begs the question in one key respect: What do we do next? The success of the pro-democracy movement could partly depend on the strength of an independent media. Yet over the last decade the American newspaper business has fallen into an "existential crisis" -- once formidable dailies have been dying off at an alarming rate. This has resulted in an increasing number of news deserts.
As traditional news media have faded, we have seen the rise of "pink-slime journalism" -- which is fake partisan operations masquerading as real news outlets. One can find a few left-leaning examples, but the genre is largely dominated by right-wing operations.
Dan has talked about the importance of winning House and Senate seats in purple and red parts of the country; that could be increasingly difficult in news deserts mainly served by "local" pink slime along with ever-present national propaganda organs such as Fox News.
The bottom line: The Democrats need to stop ignoring media reform. It's not enough to invest in small-scale outlets such as Pod Save America -- we also need a strategy for building and supporting larger-scale media outlets. Media scholars have been researching this for a while but have largely been ignored by the political class. Continue to do so at your own risk.
I strongly agree that media reform would be a tremendous boon. Laws could prevent industrial companies from owning news media outlets. There are definitional hurdles to be cleared in any such laws, but that’s why lawyers write the laws.
Special tax structures, public interest corporations, strengthened laws regarding defamation, libel, and slander suits. Some of those are being tried in places, but we need federal laws to reinforce such efforts.
But until then, what if we tried actually supporting those news outlets that exist today? All I read is that newspapers are passé, TV news is for those in retirement homes, and it has somehow become virtuous to cancel a subscription over a spiked endorsement. (Whatever happened to critical letters to the editor from paid subscribers?)
Meanwhile the Internet has some fine reporting ( but all struggle to get actual paying customers), but too much of the news content there is unattributed, stolen content from actual businesses who pay reporters in remote places and real editors.
Not ranting at you. Your ideas are good. I am ranting at those who think cynicism is a civic virtue.
Dan’s not wrong—we have a huge problem with media in this country (and elsewhere) but—big picture—it’s a huge problem for democracy. It’s been said that in order for capitalism to be an acceptable economic system it must be accompanied by a robust and healthy democracy to keep it in check. The problem with that of course is that the beneficiaries of unbridled capitalism will always be motivated to undermine democratic institutions, i.e., news media organizations in pursuit of their own self interests. Bezos is a perfect example of this, among so many, unfortunately.
In a word, FUCK Jeff Bezos. When his epitaph is written, and it can’t happen soon enough, what will be featured most prominently is not his business success, but his “full and total” as Trump would put it, sell out to Donald Trump. 75 million would have saved a lot of those jobs at WAPO but Bezos chose to redirect it as tribute to the disgusting Melania Trump. Bezos and his ilk have all been unmasked as the spineless, unprincipled cowards they, in retrospect, always were. It took a 2nd Trump Administration to pull the masks fully off. I unsubscribed from the WAPO after the gutting of the opinion section. Then I resubscribed solely because I missed the estimable Ron Charles and his unparalleled book section. Now that is gone also and with it my subscription, never to return. I assume Bezos will be around long after Trump has expired. I hope with the benefit of distance and hindsight that his shame burns a hole through his soul, if he even has one.
But for fourteen years, Bezos published a paper that would have gone bankrupt had he not purchased it. To be fair, they published a lot of great stories in that time. Just to name a few, they broke the Access Hollywood tapes, the Teixeira-Classified Docs story, the Afghanistan Papers, pinned the opioid crisis on corporations who knowingly caused it, de-bunked the Project Veritas sting, supported Hannah Natanson’s reporting into the chaos caused by Trump among the federal workforce, and many deep visual forensics investigations —among them the Lafayette Square investigation, the Minneapolis murders, and numerous police shootings. And enlarged on the leak of the aTrump tax returns, crypto corruption in the Trump family, and deep investigations into CECOT.
Maybe Bezos caved to Trumpian pressure. But maybe, after 14 years, he’s tired of people examining every headline for bias, vocal hatred of billionaires, and hoping he dies soon.
Maybe he caved to Trumpian pressure? You can't be serious All the evidence you need for that is the 75 million he gifted Melania for a movie that nobody wants to watch. And, you know what, if he's tired, sell the paper. Don't gut it. Yes, he saved it back in 2013. But he consciously destroyed in 2026
So you're a mind reader. You are somehow sure that you know there was no inner conflict between any democratic instincts and trying his best to take improper and illegal pressure off his businesses.
My point is that I hear a lot of condescending “wisdom” from people who never acknowledged that, for a decade plus, he preserved a great paper that the Graham family left in desperate shape. And it reported some fantastic stories during that time.
Maybe he’s just trimming it down to a size its income will support, and declining to throw away more of his money trying to placate people who start their criticism with “Fuck Jeff Bezos”.
As for selling it, maybe he can find a fellow rich guy who gets off on insults.
But in the end, for all his good work prior to the Second Trump Admin, he first chose to hamstring the opinion section after Trump took office, which led to a significant loss of the subscriber base, in addition to an exodus of many world class journalists. And now, his hand picked stooge, who doesn’t have a clue about how to run a newspaper, rips out sections that kept readers on board in an effort to save all the money they lost when the subscriber base contracted. Key the second exodus of subscribers, which will lead to more section and staff reductions. In the end, the WAPO will be an empty, which was entirely predictable once Bezos chose to bend the knee to Trump
Dan, I understand your feelings about the Post. I had similar feelings about the Los Angeles times, a paper that was widely considered to be a first class paper when I was growing up. But, rich guys owning media companies has always been a problem. Think of William Randolph Hearst. In a way, I think it’s healthy to look at the current state of media as a good thing. Anyone with a phone can record and distribute information that traditional news outlets might shy away from. Progressive media is frustratingly small right now, but it is growing. In a nutshell, I’m glad we no longer rely on billionaires and people who work for billionaires to deliver our news. We the People have more agency than ever. We just need to act like it.
I admire your sentiment. But folks with phones will never replace large-scale news gathering organizations. Substacks and online equivalents can never scale to replace what we’re losing. Internet news aggregators (mostly) steal news reporting from big companies who pay hundreds of reporters and editors. Podcasters and substack writers get their facts from the likes of AP, the NYT, and WaPo. Crooked Media and Dan’s substack are honest about attributing these news sources. Most aren’t.
Yes, we need corporate reform for media companies. Better ownership structures, etc. But I realize that all those cell phone videos that documented the horrors of the Good and Pretti murders—I only saw them because large national media companies broadcast them endlessly. The NYT. ABC, CNN, and WaPo also provided frame-by-frame, narrated analyses of the videos.
Bezos absorbed more than $3 billion in losses during Amazon’s early years, and at a net worth well north of $200 billion, even a nine-figure annual loss at the Post is economically trivial to him. This plainly isn’t about financial strain. (If your net worth is, say, a very fortunate $2.5 million, this is the equivalent of losing a thousand bucks). So it’s not the money.
He’s owned the Washington Post for fourteen years, during which critics have eagerly treated every headline and editorial as proof of corporate sellout. At the same time, many of those same readers loudly refuse to subscribe—sometimes even congratulating themselves for it—while consuming Post reporting second-hand, unattributed, and repackaged across the internet and in podcasts.
Meanwhile, smaller outlets preen about being “billionaire-free,” despite never approaching the Post’s breadth, staffing, or ambition. All of this helps explain why Bezos might be tired of running a newspaper. If he’s lost patience, it may be less with journalism itself than with an audience that demands a world-class public service while insisting someone else pay for it—and then calls the owner corrupt for keeping the lights on.
Sure, he’s under pressure with the more profitable and industrial parts of his empire. As Lovett said on PSA recently, “what’s the use of having f***you money if you’re not going to say f*** you?”
Well, Jon, he just said f*** you to those who have been saying it to him for a decade.
Thanks, Dan, for your usual spot-on commentary. I entered Georgetown in 1968, got a similar subscription offer from the Post and read it religiously every day. I had a front-row seat to Watergate and John Thompson. I had the good fortune to read Wilbon, Kornheiser and David Broder nearly every day. I confess not being entirely pessimistic about Bezos’ purchase of the paper. I thought, with all his billions, profits would cease to matter. He had sufficient resources to fund local news outlets in a hundred cities for decades, still leaving him with billions. I regret my foolishness. What a waste of space that man and his ilk are.
Thanks Dan, what an awful story. I lived in DC for a few intervals in my life and always treasured my Washington Post. And I do believe that we need a great paper in the nation's capital, in addition to all the great independent news sources (like yours) I'm helping to support. I still dream that one day before it is truly too late, Bezos sells the paper for $1 to someone who has the will to revive it and care for it. Who in the world could convince him to do that?
"It sucks for people in the DMV" For anyone else who wondered why Dan was so worried about people in line at the Dept of Motor Vehicles, it's apparently also a nickname for the DC/Maryland/Virginia area.
Dude I was just about to Google that. Lol. Thanks!
Recently I read "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine and his observation here seems appropos:“The more men have to lose, the less willing are they to venture. The rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a Spaniel.”
Even so, not all wealthy people make these kinds of horrid choices. I'll forever be fascinated by what drives those differences.
I too am saddened by the demise of the WaPo. I was a loyal subscriber for the better part of 30 years. I stuck it out for a while as Bezos and Lewis did their worst. It was the Harris endorsement that finally made me drop my subscription. Democracy simply dies.
Very sad. Kate Graham must be spinning in her grave. I hope the departed talent of the Washington Post organize a new, successful and economically viable media company.
I remember corresponding with Dean Baquet (NYT executive editor) during Trump's first term, expressing my disappointment with the Times' pallid coverage and flat tonality during a time that was more fraught than many now, in the glare of Trump 2.0's shock and awe, seem to remember. I held up WaPo to Dean as an alternative model -- the writing was deeper, more compelling, more real. The Times, by comparison, felt washed out, almost perfunctory.
Then Bezos dumps Mackenzie, hooks up with Lauren, starts pumping iron and wearing shades, goes full-on BMOC oligarch, and nuzzles up to Trump. I guess you can see it as an epic midlife crisis. But at what terrible cost. And another installment of "Everything Trump Touches Dies: The Movie." Unfortunately, we're all extras.
Thank you, Dan, for writing this. I moved to DC thirty years ago, and raised a family here. The Post is our hometown paper. I kept my subscription longer than I should have, holding on even after Bezos spiked the Harris endorsement, because I couldn't imagine navigating my life in this city without the Post. But it's not the Post anymore. The Post is gone. Reading this, combined with Ashley Parker's moving piece in the Atlantic yesterday, underscore what this community--my community--has had robbed from them by Jeff Bezos. The news coming on the same day that the GOP House voted to gut DC's tax code (H.J.RES. 142, look it up) only underscores for me that no one is going to save DC except the people of DC, that nothing less than FULL STATEHOOD is the solution, and that America's democracy is weaker when we here in DC continue to be second-class citizens. I know I'm stretching this a bit beyond talking about modern American media, but my feelings are raw, and--in this moment--I can't help but feel it all as linked.
This is one of the most tragic obituaries I’ve ever read.
Great piece. It is shameful what Bezos has done to the Post.
This is a good overview of the Washington Post's decline, but it begs the question in one key respect: What do we do next? The success of the pro-democracy movement could partly depend on the strength of an independent media. Yet over the last decade the American newspaper business has fallen into an "existential crisis" -- once formidable dailies have been dying off at an alarming rate. This has resulted in an increasing number of news deserts.
As traditional news media have faded, we have seen the rise of "pink-slime journalism" -- which is fake partisan operations masquerading as real news outlets. One can find a few left-leaning examples, but the genre is largely dominated by right-wing operations.
Dan has talked about the importance of winning House and Senate seats in purple and red parts of the country; that could be increasingly difficult in news deserts mainly served by "local" pink slime along with ever-present national propaganda organs such as Fox News.
The bottom line: The Democrats need to stop ignoring media reform. It's not enough to invest in small-scale outlets such as Pod Save America -- we also need a strategy for building and supporting larger-scale media outlets. Media scholars have been researching this for a while but have largely been ignored by the political class. Continue to do so at your own risk.
I strongly agree that media reform would be a tremendous boon. Laws could prevent industrial companies from owning news media outlets. There are definitional hurdles to be cleared in any such laws, but that’s why lawyers write the laws.
Special tax structures, public interest corporations, strengthened laws regarding defamation, libel, and slander suits. Some of those are being tried in places, but we need federal laws to reinforce such efforts.
But until then, what if we tried actually supporting those news outlets that exist today? All I read is that newspapers are passé, TV news is for those in retirement homes, and it has somehow become virtuous to cancel a subscription over a spiked endorsement. (Whatever happened to critical letters to the editor from paid subscribers?)
Meanwhile the Internet has some fine reporting ( but all struggle to get actual paying customers), but too much of the news content there is unattributed, stolen content from actual businesses who pay reporters in remote places and real editors.
Not ranting at you. Your ideas are good. I am ranting at those who think cynicism is a civic virtue.
Dan’s not wrong—we have a huge problem with media in this country (and elsewhere) but—big picture—it’s a huge problem for democracy. It’s been said that in order for capitalism to be an acceptable economic system it must be accompanied by a robust and healthy democracy to keep it in check. The problem with that of course is that the beneficiaries of unbridled capitalism will always be motivated to undermine democratic institutions, i.e., news media organizations in pursuit of their own self interests. Bezos is a perfect example of this, among so many, unfortunately.
In a word, FUCK Jeff Bezos. When his epitaph is written, and it can’t happen soon enough, what will be featured most prominently is not his business success, but his “full and total” as Trump would put it, sell out to Donald Trump. 75 million would have saved a lot of those jobs at WAPO but Bezos chose to redirect it as tribute to the disgusting Melania Trump. Bezos and his ilk have all been unmasked as the spineless, unprincipled cowards they, in retrospect, always were. It took a 2nd Trump Administration to pull the masks fully off. I unsubscribed from the WAPO after the gutting of the opinion section. Then I resubscribed solely because I missed the estimable Ron Charles and his unparalleled book section. Now that is gone also and with it my subscription, never to return. I assume Bezos will be around long after Trump has expired. I hope with the benefit of distance and hindsight that his shame burns a hole through his soul, if he even has one.
But for fourteen years, Bezos published a paper that would have gone bankrupt had he not purchased it. To be fair, they published a lot of great stories in that time. Just to name a few, they broke the Access Hollywood tapes, the Teixeira-Classified Docs story, the Afghanistan Papers, pinned the opioid crisis on corporations who knowingly caused it, de-bunked the Project Veritas sting, supported Hannah Natanson’s reporting into the chaos caused by Trump among the federal workforce, and many deep visual forensics investigations —among them the Lafayette Square investigation, the Minneapolis murders, and numerous police shootings. And enlarged on the leak of the aTrump tax returns, crypto corruption in the Trump family, and deep investigations into CECOT.
Maybe Bezos caved to Trumpian pressure. But maybe, after 14 years, he’s tired of people examining every headline for bias, vocal hatred of billionaires, and hoping he dies soon.
Maybe he caved to Trumpian pressure? You can't be serious All the evidence you need for that is the 75 million he gifted Melania for a movie that nobody wants to watch. And, you know what, if he's tired, sell the paper. Don't gut it. Yes, he saved it back in 2013. But he consciously destroyed in 2026
So you're a mind reader. You are somehow sure that you know there was no inner conflict between any democratic instincts and trying his best to take improper and illegal pressure off his businesses.
My point is that I hear a lot of condescending “wisdom” from people who never acknowledged that, for a decade plus, he preserved a great paper that the Graham family left in desperate shape. And it reported some fantastic stories during that time.
Maybe he’s just trimming it down to a size its income will support, and declining to throw away more of his money trying to placate people who start their criticism with “Fuck Jeff Bezos”.
As for selling it, maybe he can find a fellow rich guy who gets off on insults.
But in the end, for all his good work prior to the Second Trump Admin, he first chose to hamstring the opinion section after Trump took office, which led to a significant loss of the subscriber base, in addition to an exodus of many world class journalists. And now, his hand picked stooge, who doesn’t have a clue about how to run a newspaper, rips out sections that kept readers on board in an effort to save all the money they lost when the subscriber base contracted. Key the second exodus of subscribers, which will lead to more section and staff reductions. In the end, the WAPO will be an empty, which was entirely predictable once Bezos chose to bend the knee to Trump
Dan, I understand your feelings about the Post. I had similar feelings about the Los Angeles times, a paper that was widely considered to be a first class paper when I was growing up. But, rich guys owning media companies has always been a problem. Think of William Randolph Hearst. In a way, I think it’s healthy to look at the current state of media as a good thing. Anyone with a phone can record and distribute information that traditional news outlets might shy away from. Progressive media is frustratingly small right now, but it is growing. In a nutshell, I’m glad we no longer rely on billionaires and people who work for billionaires to deliver our news. We the People have more agency than ever. We just need to act like it.
I admire your sentiment. But folks with phones will never replace large-scale news gathering organizations. Substacks and online equivalents can never scale to replace what we’re losing. Internet news aggregators (mostly) steal news reporting from big companies who pay hundreds of reporters and editors. Podcasters and substack writers get their facts from the likes of AP, the NYT, and WaPo. Crooked Media and Dan’s substack are honest about attributing these news sources. Most aren’t.
Yes, we need corporate reform for media companies. Better ownership structures, etc. But I realize that all those cell phone videos that documented the horrors of the Good and Pretti murders—I only saw them because large national media companies broadcast them endlessly. The NYT. ABC, CNN, and WaPo also provided frame-by-frame, narrated analyses of the videos.
Bezos absorbed more than $3 billion in losses during Amazon’s early years, and at a net worth well north of $200 billion, even a nine-figure annual loss at the Post is economically trivial to him. This plainly isn’t about financial strain. (If your net worth is, say, a very fortunate $2.5 million, this is the equivalent of losing a thousand bucks). So it’s not the money.
He’s owned the Washington Post for fourteen years, during which critics have eagerly treated every headline and editorial as proof of corporate sellout. At the same time, many of those same readers loudly refuse to subscribe—sometimes even congratulating themselves for it—while consuming Post reporting second-hand, unattributed, and repackaged across the internet and in podcasts.
Meanwhile, smaller outlets preen about being “billionaire-free,” despite never approaching the Post’s breadth, staffing, or ambition. All of this helps explain why Bezos might be tired of running a newspaper. If he’s lost patience, it may be less with journalism itself than with an audience that demands a world-class public service while insisting someone else pay for it—and then calls the owner corrupt for keeping the lights on.
Sure, he’s under pressure with the more profitable and industrial parts of his empire. As Lovett said on PSA recently, “what’s the use of having f***you money if you’re not going to say f*** you?”
Well, Jon, he just said f*** you to those who have been saying it to him for a decade.
Thanks, Dan, for your usual spot-on commentary. I entered Georgetown in 1968, got a similar subscription offer from the Post and read it religiously every day. I had a front-row seat to Watergate and John Thompson. I had the good fortune to read Wilbon, Kornheiser and David Broder nearly every day. I confess not being entirely pessimistic about Bezos’ purchase of the paper. I thought, with all his billions, profits would cease to matter. He had sufficient resources to fund local news outlets in a hundred cities for decades, still leaving him with billions. I regret my foolishness. What a waste of space that man and his ilk are.
Hoya Saxa.
Thanks Dan, what an awful story. I lived in DC for a few intervals in my life and always treasured my Washington Post. And I do believe that we need a great paper in the nation's capital, in addition to all the great independent news sources (like yours) I'm helping to support. I still dream that one day before it is truly too late, Bezos sells the paper for $1 to someone who has the will to revive it and care for it. Who in the world could convince him to do that?
Oh, and now's a great time to boost "The 51st"! (https://51st.news/) Join the new media revolution!