How a Billionaire Dismantled One of America’s Great Newsrooms
Jeff Bezos's destruction of the Washington Post demonstrates the problem with billionaire owned media
Jeff Bezos destroyed the Washington Post.
Yesterday, the leadership of The Washington Post announced significant layoffs—gutting the Metro section, firing most of its international correspondents (including a reporter in a war zone in Ukraine), and shuttering the sports and books sections.
It sucks.
It sucks for the roughly 300 journalists who lost their jobs. It sucks for people in the DMV who rely on the Post to understand what is happening in their community. And it sucks for our already-fragile democracy, where powerful elites increasingly face little risk of accountability through public scrutiny.
If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, you know I can be a harsh critic of the legacy media. That is a potentially unhealthy habit I developed after years of battling reporters in the White House and on the campaign trail. Like any flack worth their salt, I rarely thought my bosses got the coverage they deserved.
In recent years, I have also argued—repeatedly—that legacy media outlets—the national newspapers, cable and broadcast networks, digital sites, and wire services—have lost a great deal of their influence and relevance.
Still, watching the destruction of one of America’s great journalistic institutions saddened me more than I expected.
I went to college in Washington, D.C. When I arrived on campus, there was a flyer in our dorm advertising a special student subscription to the Post. I don’t remember the details. I just remember it being shockingly cheap. I signed up and read it every day.
This was 1994. Bill Clinton was president. The Gingrich Revolution was underway. The government would shut down. A reelection campaign would begin. I learned about the scandal that eventually led to Clinton’s impeachment by picking up the paper on my front step on my way to my White House internship.
I loved the sports section, home to all-time greats like Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, and Sally Jenkins. I learned about the city—not the town—that I would live in, on and off, for the next two decades through the Metro section.
All of that is gone now.
A number of talented, aggressive reporters still remain, particularly on the White House and Capitol Hill beats. But Jeff Bezos and publisher Will Lewis have turned a great institution into a rotting husk of its former self.
And it didn’t have to be this way.
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The Path Not Taken
The Post reportedly lost roughly $100 million last year. That financial hole is now being used to justify mass layoffs and the gutting of entire sections.
The economics of big media are genuinely hard. The battle for attention has never been fiercer. The Post is not only competing with other news organizations; it is competing with Netflix, TikTok, and every other piece of content available on a phone. The major platforms pulled the rug out from under digital publishers when they deprioritized news in their algorithms. And the rapid spread of AI is reshaping how people consume information.
But hard does not mean impossible.
In a striking contrast, The New York Times announced this week that it added 1.4 million digital subscribers last year and grew revenue by 10 percent. The Wall Street Journal is also growing its subscriber base and its overall business.
So why is the Post in such dire shape while its peers are not?
The answer is Jeff Bezos.
The Bezos Problem
Bezos bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million in cash. At the time, he was widely celebrated as a savior—a benevolent billionaire riding in to rescue a struggling paper.
The purchase was framed as proof that Bezos cared about something more than accumulating wealth—that he was investing in a vibrant fourth estate and in American democracy itself.
The paper had been adrift under previous leadership and was struggling to find its footing in the digital age. Bezos invested in the newsroom, injected ambition into the operation, and—most importantly—hired Marty Baron as executive editor. Baron—who was later featured in the film Spotlight about the Boston Globe’s investigation of the Catholic Church—is a generational talent. He rebuilt the newsroom and restored the paper’s sense of mission.
During the first Trump administration, the Post produced some of the most aggressive and consequential coverage in the country. Like many other outlets, it experienced explosive growth from 2017 through 2020. Trump’s nonstop attacks on the press turned paying for news into an act of resistance.
When Trump left office and Joe Biden took over, interest in political news collapsed. Other organizations—notably the Times—were able to pivot and build more durable businesses. The Post, under Lewis—Bezos’s hand-picked publisher—had no comparable strategy to diversify or capitalize on the gains it had made.
The newsroom floundered. Lewis, who from the outside appears to be spectacularly unsuited to the job, seemed mainly to succeed at alienating the people who worked for him.
Lewis’s failure was a sin of omission.
Bezos’s failure was a sin of commission.
When Bezos Chose Trump Over the Post
As the political winds shifted, Bezos shifted with them.
In 2013, owning a newspaper signaled status and civic virtue to elite circles. By 2024, owning a media outlet despised by Donald Trump had become a business liability.
So Bezos made two decisions that shattered reader trust and triggered a wave of cancellations.
First, he personally overruled the newsroom and spiked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024.
Second, he reshaped the editorial page to make it more Trump-friendly—firing some columnists and prompting others to resign in protest.
Those moves cannot be separated from Bezos’s broader effort to curry favor with Trump. After the election, Bezos dined with Trump. He donated millions to the inauguration. He attended the ceremony and was seated prominently.
At the same time, Amazon spent $75 million on a glossy, largely pointless documentary about Melania Trump—with tens of millions reportedly flowing directly to her.
Think about how many journalism jobs could have been saved at the Post if that $75 million had been invested in reporting instead of spent flattering Trump.
Jeff Bezos has essentially unlimited resources. He is now worth roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars—far wealthier than when he bought the paper twelve years ago.
The Washington Post could have been saved.
It was not saved because saving it would have required standing up to Donald Trump. Jeff Bezos decided that protecting his broader business interests mattered more than preserving one of the most important news organizations in the country.
To the extent there is any lesson to take from this tragedy, it is that benevolent billionaires are not the solution to our media crisis. What a billionaire gives, a billionaire can just as easily take away.
There is enormous work ahead to rebuild what has been lost—especially in local journalism, but it will only happen by building sustainable, independent media businesses that can actually compete.
Under different leadership, the Washington Post could have been one of those success stories.
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.
"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.