Glenn Kessler is the relentless fact-checker who spent many years at The Washington Post and now writes his own blog at Substack, still fact-checking.
He wrote recently about Jeff Bezos’s plan to lay off a large number of staff at the venerable newspaper. News of the impending cuts circulated for days. When it finally happened, journalists were shocked by the depth of the cuts. One third of the writers lost their jobs. The sports section was eliminated. Foreign coverage was slashed. Local reporting, a Post specialty, was cut hard.
As things now stand, one of America’s most consequential newspapers is in a death spiral, accelerated by Jeff Bezos. It is not often that we witness the destruction of a great institution by those entrusted with its care.
Ashley Parker, a former reporter for The Washington Post, wrote in The Atlantic about “The Murder of the Washington Post.”
Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)
The Post may yet rise, but this will be their enduring legacy.
“You’re right. I did lose a million dollars [on the newspaper] last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in…sixty years.”
—Charles Foster Kane, speaking to his ex-guardian, in Citizen Kane (1941)
[Diane’s note: if Jeff Bezos subsidized the Post at $100 million a year, he would run out of money in 2,500 years, or 4526, that is, assuming that he wasn’t growing his wealth at the same time.]
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, his net worth was about $25 billion. Now, as he prepares to order devastating layoffs at the newspaper, his net worth is about $250 billion — even after giving one-quarter of his Amazon shares to his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott.
Bezos is a businessman, and the Washington Post is not a charity, so I understand the inclination to demand that losses be stemmed. The newsroom should be able to stand on its own feet. But even if the losses are still around $100 million a year — the figure announced a couple of years ago — for a person of Bezos’ wealth, that would mean he’d have to close the place in…2,500 years.
I don’t think the layoffs have much to do with saving money. Amazon, after all, just spent $75 million buying and promoting a documentary about Melania Trump. It’s about power and influence in Donald Trump’s second term.
After Trump won the first time in 2016, I was among a small group of reporters and editors invited to have lunch with Bezos. With a booming laugh and big smile, he said he wanted to hear war stories about covering the wild Trump-versus-Clinton campaign.
At one point, someone asked if he was concerned that Trump would seek retribution against his other businesses. (I’m writing this from memory, not notes, so I won’t use quotation marks.)
Bezos acknowledged that Trump would assume any negative story about him had been ordered up by Bezos, because that’s what Trump would do if he owned a newspaper. But he said that wasn’t our problem. We only had to write the best stories possible; he could handle the heat if Trump got mad.
Those were comforting words at the time. As far as I know, Bezos has never interfered with any news coverage during his 13 years as owner — even stories critical of Amazon or coverage of Bezos’s personal life, let alone politics. For many years, he didn’t even appear to get very involved with the editorial page, even though, as owner, he could dictate whatever opinion-page policy he wanted.
As Bezos predicted, Trump in his first term often fumed about the “Amazon Washington Post” — they are not connected — and his administration took actions that were costly to Bezos. The Pentagon gave a $10-billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft, and Amazon sued in 2020, saying Trump intervened because of his anger at The Post. (In 2022, the Microsoft contract was scrapped, and the business was split among four firms, including Amazon.)
Yet Bezos was unbowed. He embraced and promoted a new slogan — Democracy Dies in Darkness — that seemed aimed directly at Trump’s administration. He boosted the size of the staff and increased the ambitions of The Post. He appeared to embrace the idea, dare I say, that he was the steward of a public trust.
Presidential-level threats disappeared with Trump’s defeat in 2020, though Joe Biden was no fan of the tech industry. But when Trump ran again and the Democrats were on the ropes, Bezos’s calculation changed. He could afford Trump’s first term; a second could be ruinous, especially as Elon Musk, his main rival in the space business, embraced Trump.
I used to think billionaires had enough “fuck-you” money to do what they pleased. But in Trump’s creeping autocracy, and with his campaign of retribution, billionaires have too much to lose.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta spent $100 million to fund fact-checking around the globe. But once Trump was elected, Zuckerberg pulled the plug on funding U.S. fact-checkers, shutting many down. Bezos scrubbed a planned newspaper endorsement of Kamala Harris and announced a rightward shift in the opinion pages, leading hundreds of thousands of subscribers to cancel their subscriptions. That, of course, likely increased the losses.
If there was ever a time for a news organization to need help from a billionaire, it’s now — when AI is killing search traffic and new ways to attract readers are needed. This is when investments are required, not cutbacks.
Even before Trump re-emerged, Bezos appeared to have grown less interested in The Post. The New York Times capitalized on subscriber growth during Trump’s first term to make acquisitions that expanded its reach (The Athletic, Wordle). The Post made no such moves. Subscriber growth stalled, then slipped. Bezos lavished attention on his new love, Lauren Sánchez, whom he married last year in Venice in a $50-million extravaganza. He also spent $500 million on the most expensive superyacht in the world — twice what he paid for The Post.
Unlike Scott — who has given away more than $19 billion to 2,000 non-profit organizations— Bezos has set aside a pittance of his net worth for philanthropy. Many Post reporters hoped Bezos would simply give the newspaper to his ex-wife, believing she had a greater sense of social responsibility (and none of his corporate conflicts).
No longer engaged, Bezos appears to have embraced a crude calculus: laying off staff and trimming the sails of a once-great news organization sends a message to an audience of one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, even if the decision ruins the lives of scores of talented reporters and editors.
After all, since the election Bezos has worked hard to ingratiate himself with Trump —making a $1 million donation (via Amazon) to the inaugural fund., dining at the White House, visiting Mar-a-Lago and, according to Trump, solving “a problem very quickly.” (Amazon had planned to list the cost of tariffs with products, but canceled that after Trump called Bezos.)
Trump views any news that is not favorable as “fake news.” He couldn’t have been happy with The Post’s aggressive coverage last year of the dismantling of the federal government, which led to an FBI raid on a reporter’s home in January.
But Trump views Bezos as trying to make the newspaper “more fair,” as he put it in a March interview with Clay Travis. “I think it’s great,” Trump gushed. “It’s such a difference between now and the first…He’s really trying to be more fair. But they actually did a couple of bad articles that everybody said, ‘This is crazy.’”
In another interview, with Sharyl Attkisson, Trump said, “I’ve gotten to know him and I think he’s trying to do a real job. Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post. And that wasn’t happening before.”
And so far in the second term, not once has Trump referred to the “Amazon Washington Post.”
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