As goes the Washington Post: US democracy takes another hit under Trump | Washington Post
The email landed in Lizzie Johnson’s mailbox in Ukraine just before 16:00 local time. It has come at a difficult time for the reporter: Russia has repeatedly attacked the country’s power grid, and just a few days ago he had been forced to work in his car without heat, electricity or running water; He was writing with a pencil because the pen ink hardened very quickly.
The subject line was “Hard news.” The main text stated: “As part of today’s organizational changes, your position has been eliminated” and explained that getting rid of it was necessary to meet the “evolving needs of our business.”
Johnson’s reaction may go down in the annals of American media history. “I was fired by the Washington Post in the middle of a war zone,” he said wrote to x. “I have no say.”
The Washington Post’s Ukraine correspondent may have been left speechless by Amazon billionaire and Post owner Jeff Bezos’ move on Wednesday to lay off more than 300 people, nearly a third of the paper’s workforce. The bloodshed, which has revived fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Donald Trump’s onslaught, wiped out the paper’s entire sports department, much of its culture and local staff, and all of its journalists in arid news regions such as Ukraine and the Middle East.
But others managed to find their language. “It’s a bad day” he said dongrahamThe son of the Post’s legendary Watergate-era owner, Katharine Graham, has broken his silence since selling the newspaper to Bezos for $250 million in 2013.
“I’m Crushed” was the lament of Bob Woodward, one half of the paper’s double act exposing Watergate with Carl Bernstein.
“This is among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” he said Marty BaronFamous former editor-in-chief of the Post. The outspoken Baron blasted Bezos for his “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump” and said it had left a particularly “ugly stain” on the newspaper’s reputation.
Hundreds of people marched in front of the Post Office building on Thursday to voice their support for their laid-off colleagues. “It’s a huge disappointment. They don’t seem to care about this institution and the people who run it,” said Patrick Nielsen, an engineer at the paper.
Prominent Post alumni also expressed howls of dismay in interviews with the Guardian. Robert McCartney, a 39-year veteran of the Post newspaper until his retirement five years ago, said it was a “tragedy and a disgrace.”
McCartney, like many inside the Post, was struck by the stark contrast between the way Bezos ran the paper during Donald Trump’s first term and his behavior in Trump 2.0.
McCartney was a senior journalist at the paper during Bezos’ first eight years of ownership until Trump’s first presidency. Like many people at the time, he was grateful for Bezos’ tutelage.
“We saw him as a savior. He pumped money into the Post, didn’t meddle in the newsroom, and stood up to Trump,” he said.
Fast forward to 2026 and a very different Bezos has emerged. In 2017, just after Trump’s first inauguration, the Post unveiled its new slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness.”
That phrase still walks proudly underneath tag. But at the end of a week like this, America looks noticeably darker.
Marcus Brauchli, who was the Post’s editor-in-chief until 2012 and now runs the investment firm North Base Media, said this was a terrible moment to deal a blow to one of the nation’s biggest guardians of public accountability: “These are historic times, given the whirlwind of world order and the American system of government. This is the time when journalism matters most. I mean the firings of reporters in Ukraine, Now.”
Bezos doesn’t seem to need the money. According to him, he is the fourth richest person on the planet to ForbesHe has a fortune of $245 billion.
As Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, pointed outBezos could offset the Post’s five-year annual $100 million loss by taking a cut of a single week’s earnings.
The trainwreck image of Wednesday’s announcement was also demonic: The job of confronting the distraught staff on Zoom was handed over to the Post’s hapless current executive editor, Matt Murray.
Bezos was nowhere to be seen. But he was there at the beginning of the week. wide teleportation Trump’s defense secretary welcomed Pete Hegseth to space company Blue Origin’s headquarters in Florida.
Will Lewis, Bezos’ advisor as publisher of the Post, also didn’t have the courage to introduce himself as the guillotine came down. A day after he presided over the evisceration of the newspaper’s sports section, noticed Joining the red carpet at the NFL Super Bowl event in San Francisco.
But on Saturday night, Lewis abruptly resigned, acknowledging that he had made “difficult decisions” while praising Bezos’ leadership at the paper.
The firings come just five days after the release of Melania, the First Lady documentary financed by Amazon Prime Video. Bezos has sunk $75 million into this pile of “gilded trash,” but unlike the Post, he seems unimpressed by the film’s paltry return on investment.
“What Bezos did for Melania while emptying his own newspaper,” the historian wrote Simon SchamaIt will come to be seen as “the most glaring symptom of cultural collapse in a democracy that clings to truth by a thread.”
This inevitable turning point has been on the horizon for some time. The first warning signs came in October 2024, when Bezos withdrew the Post’s planned endorsement of Trump’s Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, just 11 days before the presidential election.
A wave of public outcry ensued, leading to the cancellation of at least 250,000 Post subscriptions.
Shortly thereafter, the billionaire unilaterally imposed new restrictions on the newspaper’s opinion content. He introduced what he called “two pillars”: “personal freedoms and free markets.”
This sent many of the paper’s leading commentators running for the exit, including economics columnist Eduardo Porter, who now writes for the Guardian. “This layering of dogma undermined critical thinking,” Porter recalled. “He turned the Post into something church-like, with tight restrictions on thought.”
This week’s long knife day has left many people desperately searching for an explanation. There were clearly business motives at play: You can’t become a gazillionaire like Bezos without caring about profit limits, and the Post has been hit by industry headwinds in recent years.
But there are other, more malicious comments. McCartney remembers 2019, when Amazon lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract during Trump’s first term.
Amazon complained in a case He said it was a blatant act of retaliation by Trump and that he was punishing Bezos for the Washington Post’s incisive coverage of his administration. Could this bruising experience have caused Bezos to change his tune and conclude that shining a light in defense of American democracy has come at too high a price for the jewels of his business empire, Amazon and Blue Origin?
“It’s very likely that the desire to appease Trump, to calm him down, played a role in these decisions,” McCartney said.
That’s a chilling thought for a beacon of responsible journalism like the Washington Post. And it goes against the already dire situation of the US media.
Nearly 3,500 newspapers have been published since 2000. closed shopThat leaves one in four Americans now living in a news desert and without a local newspaper. The latest loss was at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which will publish its final issue in May. It was founded in 1786, three years before George Washington became the first president.
While many newspapers have folded, others have fallen into the hands of a new generation of super-rich tech and venture capitalist owners like Bezos, who view journalism as an asset to be monetized: The Los Angeles Times was purchased by biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong in 2018.
Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong showed signs of Trump Appeasement Syndrome. He also refused to allow his newspaper to endorse Harris days before the 2024 election.
Historic newspapers are declining, news deserts are increasing: This is fertile ground where misinformation and the Maga epidemic can grow. Trump has ruthlessly developed this to his advantage.
Trump, long hostile to what he calls the “fake news media,” has taken his revenge against truth seekers to a new level. He stripped public media channels NPR and PBS of more than $1 billion in federal funding, launched frontal attacks against individual journalists and outlets who exposed his corruption and lies, and pursued a bullying campaign against corporate owners designed to force them into compliance.
CBS News is a perfect example. Trump has hit Paramount, which owns the news network, with a $10 billion lawsuit over his 60-minute pre-election interview with Harris. Although the case was ridiculed as fake, Paramount settled for $16 million.
No doubt what Paramount had in mind was its merger with Skydance Media, which would require federal (i.e. Trump’s) approval.
Following the merger, David Ellison became CEO of Paramount Skydance. He is the son of billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is a close friend and advisor to Trump.
The younger Ellison went ahead and appointed anti-woke commentator Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, which sent shockwaves through the network’s dazed and demoralized staff. Weiss, who came to the job with no television industry experience, quickly confirmed his fears.
He filmed a 60 Minutes segment about the infamous Cecot megaprison in El Salvador, where the Trump administration is deporting immigrants. His first hires among CBS News contributors include Niall Ferguson, a Trump loyalist and former US marine, a prominent vaccine skeptic friend of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, and fellow anti-woke firebrands.
The cumulative malaise that has descended on the US media leaves the country’s democratic institutions vulnerable to attack. He cannot be blamed solely for Trump’s excesses.
There are plenty of willing accomplices and capitulators, including universities like Columbia, corporate law firms, and the enthusiastic conservative activists who now control the supreme court.
But from Trump’s perspective, a knee-jerk media certainly helps. The results are available everywhere you look.
Trump is freed, his chains are undone. He feels so comfortable with his gorgeous skin that he could scold a respected female CNN reporter for questioning her about the Epstein files. never smile.
He can shamelessly peddle racism by posting a video depicting the first Black president and his first lady as monkeys.
It could send a masked paramilitary force onto the streets of Minneapolis, resulting in Americans being killed for exercising their first amendment rights. When polls for November’s midterm elections look challenging for him, he may be preparing for another blitzkrieg on the foundations of American democracy: the ballot box.
There is a paradox in all this. Many of the democratic norms that Trump has destroyed—for example, his destruction of the norm of Justice Department independence in his persecution of political rivals—were established in the wake of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.
This is the same Watergate scandal that was brought to light by two brave reporters at a newspaper called the Washington Post.
