Issue:
March 2026 | Cover story
Jeff Bezos’s gutting of the Washington Post was about political power, not money
In 2009, Blaine Harden, then Tokyo correspondent for the Washington Post, told an FCCJ audience about the “terrible pickle” faced by his employer and the rest of the legacy media. “There is this incredible problem about where you get money”, he lamented. Despite over half the population of Washington seeing the Post in print or online every day, the paper had lost $200 million in 2008, with no end to the financial bleeding in sight. Online advertising attracted just 11% of the revenue of the hardcopy paper, he said.
Harden could not have predicted the Post’s apparent savior four years later, when Jeff Bezos launched a $250 million buyout. Would a title that had built its storied reputation on holding rich and powerful feet to the fire bend to its billionaire owner’s whims? The Amazon boss was all charm, schmoozing a “room full of 20-hard-bitten journalists” on his first visit to the paper in September 2013. Bezos lauded its history of investigative journalism and later even made a heartfelt speech to the widow of Postjournalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had been butchered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the orders of Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
More importantly, he left in place as editor Marty Baron, who had made his name at the Boston Globe, confronting sexual abuse by Catholic priests – not a man to be pushed around. What could possibly go wrong?
The answer came in February this year in a way that shocked those same hard-bitten hacks. The Post gutted its international desk, sacking 300 journalists, including former Tokyo correspondents Chico Harlan (2010-2014) and Anna Fifield (2014-2018). The Seoul news hub was closed. In total, nearly a third of the paper’s staff were culled via email or video. Among them was Ukraine correspondent Lizzie Johnson, who took to X to complain that she had just been laid off in the middle of a war zone. “I have no words. I’m devastated,” she wrote. Baron called it “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
Confronting taboos
Ironically, the Washington Post had made its mark in Tokyo by confronting powerful taboos. Among its most famous scoops (by T.R. Reid) was the engagement of Crown Prince Naruhito and Masako Owada – now the emperor and empress. The vernacular media had been asked to refrain from reporting on the prince’s search for a wife. The Post’s Tokyo correspondents also wrote widely read stories on organized crime and Japanese press clubs.
After Bezos’s announcement Michelle Lee, the Tokyo/Seoul bureau chief, quickly organized a GoFundMe campaign to help the “dozens of international employees who were essential to our coverage of global events” get home safely. “These workers are not eligible for protection under the Washington Post Guild and are, in many instances, being laid off with less favorable terms while also facing immense logistical challenges and, in certain cases, serious security risks,” the appeal said. “Please help us support this deeply courageous team of people.” It has since raised $242,000)
That wouldn’t pay the annual dining bill of a man who in 2021 spent $5.5 billion to spend four minutes in space. Indeed, as some pointed out, the interest payments on Bezos’s $266 billion fortune would make the Post’s losses look like a “rounding error”. The Twitter account of The Washington Post Guild estimates that all the announced job losses could have been saved with an injection of just $2 million.
One commentator calculated that the man who endorsed the Post’s soaring new motto, Democracy Dies in Darkness, when he took over the paper could absorb five years of its losses with that he makes in a single week. As Guardian columnist Jane Martinson noted, Bezos’ ownership of the Post was yet more proof “that owning a newspaper is not about money; it’s about power and influence”.
During its golden era, the Washington Post claimed arguably the biggest scalp in the history of journalism when its reporting on the Watergate scandal helped force the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Initially under Bezos, the paper increased online subscriptions, made more money and produced some of the most acclaimed journalism in the U.S., winning at least 18 Pulitzer Prizes, including one for its coverage of the mob attack on the US Capitol in January 2021. Bezos mostly stayed out of the newsroom.
Trump’s sharp elbows
Naturally, this coverage didn’t endear the paper to Donald Trump. In a lengthy interview with NPR, Baron recalled the president’s dislike for the Post and rehearsed how he began squeezing it, starting with a private dinner with Bezos and Baron in 2017. “Trump was speaking almost entirely directly to Bezos, who was across the table,” Baron said. “And he was constantly criticizing our coverage, suggesting that we had not paid attention to his achievements, that we had been unfair to him. And every time he would make a point like that, he would elbow me.”
Browbeating the paper into running more flattering coverage of his presidency was one Trump strategy. Another was withholding government largesse. After Amazon lost a $10 billion government computing contract in 2021, a lawsuit blamed Trump for taking revenge on Bezos, whom he took to calling “Jeff Bozo”. The first sign that the paper was pulling in its horns in came just before the 2025 presidential election, when its endorsement of Kamala Harris, Trump’s losing Democratic rival, was spiked. About 250,000 subscribers abandoned the paper in disgust.
In January 2025, the Post’s Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after her editors failed to publish a cartoon showing Bezos and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg kneeling before Trump. Zuckerberg had just fired Facebook’s fact-checkers, in anticipation of Trump’s second coming. That move, too, lost it subscribers. And it can’t have helped that, unlike the New York Times, the Post was struggling to make the transition to digital subscriptions, or that it had already shed 400 staff in the three years before Bezos fired his bazooka.
Critics say Bezos compounded the Post’s problems by appointing British executive Will Lewis as publisher and CEO in late 2023, reportedly on a salary of $3million. A former executive with News International, Lewis was “universally reviled” at the paper, where he clashed with staff and fumbled his managerial role. His resignation a few days after the mass cull in February triggered a” thousand celebratory messages and emojis”, according to a Post staff writer.
To rub salt in the wounds, at the same time as Bezos was gutting the Post, Amazon released its $75 million movie Melania. The movie, about the current First Lady, was compared by reviewers to a Trump “infomercial”, “1960s Chinese propaganda”, and an inferior “Triumph of the Will”, referring to Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda movie about the Nazis. Trump, however, was delighted, calling it a “must-watch”.
No comment
Most of the Post’s current staff are keeping their powder dry as they contemplate their next steps in a media landscape littered with the detritus of bankruptcies and layoffs. But some have been posting comments anonymously on the guild’s website: “For my total of nearly six years here, I’ve run toward danger, as have so many others … because I believe so deeply in our mission and I believe The Post had my back,” one said. “So to be laid off on Wednesday over email, locked out of the newsroom, kicked off Slack and Ellipsis – and while actively working on a story like so many others – was unimaginable. I can’t believe this is the same company I trusted for all these years.”
Kelly Kasulis Cho, a reporter and editor in the Seoul bureau, wrote that her reward for rushing “without question” in December 2024 to South Korea’s national assembly to cover the attempted imposition of martial law, risking arrest – or worse - was to see her life “upended”. She ended her message by appealing for work.
There was, however, an undercurrent of defiance at the man who, in the words of the Atlantic, had “murdered” one of the world’s leading media brands. “If Jeff Bezos is no longer willing to invest in the mission that has defined this paper for generations and serve the millions who depend on Post journalism, then The Post deserves a steward that will.”
Billionaire media bosses
For decades, a standard text on British journalism courses has been James Curran and Jean Seaton’s book Power Without Responsibility, which details the history of the news media from the 18th century to the present day. The book takes its title from a speech by Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Conservative Party, who warned back in 1931 about the perils of allowing a few rich men to dominate the newspaper industry. What such people were seeking, Baldwin said, was “power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”. Among those he had in mind was the Rothermere family, which still owns a media empire that includes the right-wing Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and the MailOnline – s stable of titles frequently accused of attacking immigrants and encouraging xenophobia.
Arguably the most famous modern media baron is Rupert Murdoch, whose family runs a global media empire through the Fox Corporation and News Corp Sun (his son Lachlan Murdoch now chairs both companies), which includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Times and the Sun newspapers. In the 1980s, Murdoch’s titles backed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as she took on Britain’s unions. In 1986, Murdoch famously moved production of his newspapers to a new printing plant in east London, sacking 5,000 workers and breaking the back of the industry’s unions. He has since used his media platforms to advance political causes such as free market economics and to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change. In 2003, all of his 175 editors around the world backed the US-led war in Iraq, which he supported.
Baldwin would surely have been alarmed at the digital revolution, unless, like Donald Trump, he enjoyed the support of its most powerful titans. The world’s richest person (and a Trump supporter) owns X and has turned it into a platform for his rightwing politics and conspiracy theories. The family of David Ellison, a Trump ally and the world’s second-richest person, owns Paramount, including CBS, which caved to Trump last year in a private lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s third-richest person runs Meta (Facebook and Instagram), which effectively ended its third-party fact-checking program in favor of a user-driven "community notes" system before Trump’s reelection.
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Freedom of the Press Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
