The media industry is still reeling at the latest cost-cutting measures at the Washington Post, which involved shuttering the paper's entire sports desk and hundreds of layoffs across other departments. It's the "latest stage in the slow-motion destruction of what had been one of [the] most respected news organizations in the world," writes ex-Post staffer Perry Bacon for the New Republic, where he also points the finger at one person in particular for the paper's current chaos: owner Jeff Bezos. "America desperately needs, more than any point in my lifetime, a robust news organization ... firmly committed to fairness and accuracy but also willing to be honest and forthright about the radicalism of Trump and the current Republican Party," Bacon writes. "A paper whose motto is 'Democracy Dies in Darkness' should be that outlet. But one man opposes that vision, and sadly, only Jeff Bezos' opinion counts."
Bacon writes that, during Trump's first term, the Post did decent coverage of his "misdeeds," boosting readership. After Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, Bacon says the paper had the opportunity to lean even more into the "defending democracy" lane. "But that was not what Bezos wanted," Bacon writes, noting that the Amazon founder instead started making moves that appeared to be pushing the paper more toward the right, including by not renewing some liberal writers' contracts. The latest staff bloodbath puts the Post in an even more precarious position, per Bacon. The paper "could have been the moral center of the news industry in this era, as it was during the 1970s after breaking the Watergate scandal," he writes. "It had the reporters, editors, editorial writers, columnists, researchers, lawyers, and legacy. But it didn't have the owner. And that flaw proved fatal." More here.
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