I’m worried about what’s happening at The Washington Post. The newspaper has long been an icon for its integrity and its high journalistic standards. The Graham family owned it from 1933, when Eugene Meyer, father of Katherine Graham, bought it at a bankruptcy auction, until 2013, when the newspaper was sold to Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.
In 2021, the Post’s executive editor Marty Baron retired and was replaced by veteran journalist Sally Buzbee, who had spent her career at the Associated Press.
Bezos won plaudits for not injecting himself into the newspaper’s editorial decisions. He wanted the newspaper to grow from a regional newspaper to a global one.
The newspaper won Pulitzer Prizes, but it suffered a loss of $77 million in revenues in 2023, as well as declining readership.
Bezos decided to shake things up by cutting the staff of the Post and bringing in fresh blood. In October 2023, the buyouts affected 240 members of the staff (10% of all Post employees), including most of the research team, whose work was vital for investigative reporting. For those who remained, this was a stunning blow. They assumed that Bezos, currently the richest man in the world with a net worth of $209 billion, would ignore the losses to keep the historic newspaper strong.
They were wrong.
In late 2023, Bezos selected William Lewis to become publisher of the Post. Lewis was a veteran journalist who had worked for British newspapers, including Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, editor of the politically conservative Daily Telegraph, publisher of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and CEO of Murdoch’s Dow Jones.
In early June of this year, Buzbee resigned after clashing with Will Lewis and was replaced as executive editor by Matt Murphy, former editor-in-chief of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
Lewis added fellow British journalist Robert Winnett as editor of the Post. Winnett spent 17 years at The Daily Telegraph.
With the new lineup, the trouble began.
In December 2023, David Folkenflip reported on NPR that Will Lewis helped Murdoch to navigate his way through the phone hacking scandal that engulfed News of the World and led to its demise. He wrote about Bezos’ choice of Will Lewis as the new publisher of The Washington Post:
The man picked to lead the Post — a paper with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — stands accused of helping to lead a massive cover-up of criminal activity when he was acting outside public view.
In lawsuits against News Corp.’s British newspapers, lawyers for Prince Harry and movie star Hugh Grant depict Lewis as a leader of a frenzied conspiracy to kneecap public officials hostile to a multibillion-dollar business deal and to delete millions of potentially damning emails. In addition, they allege, Lewis sought to shield the CEO of News Corp.’s British arm, News UK, from scrutiny and to conceal the extent of wrongdoing at News of the World’s more profitable sister tabloid, The Sun.
Folkenflik revealed in June that Will Lewis had offered him an interview if he would not write about his role in the phone hacking scandal. Lewis said that he had a conversation with a person at NPR before he assumed his duties at the Post.
And then all hell broke out.
The staff was demoralized and angry. They didn’t like the way Buzbee was sidelined, and they didn’t trust Lewis. Lewis told them about his plans for the future, and they were confused, not mollified.
Bezos took the unusual step of meeting with the newsroom staff. That was not enough to quell their anger about the layoffs and the new team at the top.
Media critic Dan Froomkin wrote about this meeting:
It was during a contentious, dismissive meeting he held with newsroom staffers a few hours after unceremoniously driving out executive editor Sally Buzbee and replacing her with two additional white male former Murdoch henchmen.
“If we keep doing the same things in the same ways,” the publisher said, according to one report, “we’re nuts,”
The big question, of course, is what he and his new Praetorian guard want to do differently. Thus far, he’s only shared the radical yet unformed idea of splitting the main newsroom in two and devoting the second one to the wildly enigmatic goals of “service and social media” to attract a new audience. That’s the sort of plan you announce when you either have no plan or have one that you know won’t survive the scrutiny of your peers…. [Diane’s note: Other accounts of Lewis’ vision say that he plans for three newsrooms: one for opinions; one for the core daily news; and a third for social media and digital platforms geared toward younger audiences].
And given their previous affiliations with Murdoch and with the fiercely right-wing Telegraph newspaper – sometimes referred to as the Torygraph — there is a palpable fear in and out of the Post newsroom that the three men will drag the Post’s political coverage in a more pro-Trump direction.
Froomkin thought that the Post had a golden opportunity to be a forceful voice for the principles of democracy and truth, since the New York Times was committed to normalizing Trump and downplaying his threat to the nation.
He wrote:
So there is an extraordinary opportunity here for the Post to be the first elite newsroom to abandon the both-sides and pox-on-both-your-houses reporting style and instead actively warn readers that at this moment in our history, one party’s faults are wildly more dangerous than the other’s to both the free press and to a free country. That means relentless truth-telling along with remedial civics education and nonstop coverage of the stakes of the 2024 election
The Times’s egregiously restrained political coverage has left this lane wide open for the Post. And nothing could be more appropriate for the Post’s brand. The Post’s brand is bringing down a corrupt president; bold truth-telling that holds power to account. That’s an enormously powerful brand, both nationally and internationally, if the newsroom can deliver.
Was the ex-Murdoch team at the top likely to go in that direction?
The revelations about Will Lewis’s brand of Murdoch journalism kept coming, especially from NPR’s David Folkenflik. He wrote that Lewis and Winnett engaged in practices that might be okay in England but are considered unethical in the U.S. They paid people for stories (“checkbook journalism”), they used stolen records as the basis of scoops.
He wrote:
A vast chasm divides common practices in the fiercely competitive confines of British journalism, where Lewis and Winnett made their mark, and what passes muster in the American news media. In several instances, their alleged conduct would raise red flags at major U.S. outlets, including The Washington Post.
Among the episodes: a six-figure payment for a major scoop; planting a junior reporter in a government job to secure secret documents; and relying on a private investigator who used subterfuge to secure private documents from their computers and phones. The investigator was later arrested.
On Saturday evening, The New York Times disclosed a specific instance in which a former reporter implicated both Lewis and Winnett in reporting that he believed relied on documents that were fraudulently obtained by a private investigator…
Allegations in court that Lewis sought to cover up a wide-ranging phone hacking scandal more than a dozen years ago at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers are proving to be a flashpoint for the new Post publisher.
On at least four occasions since being named to lead the Post last fall, Lewis tried to head off unwelcome scrutiny from Post journalists — and from NPR.
In December, before he started the job, Lewis intensely pressured me not to report on the accusations, which arose in British suits against Murdoch’s newspapers in the U.K. He also repeatedly offered me an exclusive interview on his business plans for the Post if I dropped the story. I did not. The ensuing NPR piece offered the first detailed reports on new material underlying allegations from Prince Harry and others.
Immediately after that article ran, Lewis told then-Executive Editor Sally Buzbee it was not newsworthy and that her teams should not follow it, according to a person with contemporaneous knowledge. That intervention is being reported here for the first time. The Post did not run a story.
Eventually the Post did cover the scandalous behavior of its new leaders.
On June 20, CNN reported that two Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists blasted the leadership at their newspaper:
“I don’t know a single person at the Post who thinks the current situation with the publisher and supposed new editor can stand,” David Maraniss, an associate editor who has worked at The Post for nearly five decades and won two Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper, wrote in a candid Facebook post. “There might be a few, but very very few.”
Maraniss also zinged Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Post who installed Lewis, writing that he is “not of and for the Post or he would understand.”
Scott Higham, another Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Post, echoed Maraniss’ call for Lewis to exit the newspaper.
“Will Lewis needs to step down for the good of The Post and the public,” Higham replied in a comment on Maraniss’ post. “He has lost the newsroom and will never win it back.”
Spokespersons for Bezos and The Post did not immediately comment.
The backlash from The Post’s journalists comes after serious questions were raised about Lewis, who has been the subject of several explosive reports in recent days scrutinizing his journalistic integrity.
The New York Times reported over the weekend that, in his Fleet Street days, Lewis assigned an article that was based on stolen phone records. And The Post itself reported in a 3,000-word front page expose Sunday that a “thief” who used deceptive tactics to obtain private material had ties with Lewis’ hand-picked incoming top editor, Robert Winnett.
On June 21, Will Lewis announced that Robert Winnett had decided to stay in London and would not be joining the Post as editor.
It’s by no means clear that dropping Winnett will be enough to satisfy the newsroom.
Just yesterday, an article in the Post revealed that Will Lewis retains a financial interest in a small, digital-based firm that has contracts to work for The Post. The newspaper said the agreement does not violate its conflict-of-interest policy. But it smells funny.
Stay tuned. The fate of a great newspaper is at stake.
Diane Ravitch's blog 