[Editor’s note: Cameron Barr is former senior managing editor of the Washington Post. During his time there, he oversaw teams that won thirteen Pulitzers Prizes and he served as deputy to former Post executive editor Martin Baron. Cameron himself was a finalist for a Pulitzer in 2003 and was a foreign correspondent for ten years before joining the Post.]
DURING THE FIRST TRUMP administration, the Washington Post galloped back to profitability, demonstrating that principled and aggressive coverage of a renegade presidency was good for business. Audience and revenues surged, readers celebrated the newspaper as a pillar of democracy, and the staff grew.
The Post’s inability to make money covering a second Trump administration is, by that precedent, a business catastrophe. It is also evidence of a moral collapse. If there were any lingering doubt, it should now be put to rest: Jeff Bezos lacks the courage and resolve to lead one of the great institutions in American journalism.
To put it in terms Bezos would use, he is no longer a swashbuckling badass. He should sell the Post to someone who is.
Americans are witnessing the steady emergence of an authoritarian regime bent on curtailing their freedoms and ensuring its own longevity. Dictatorships near and far have shown us that a key step on the road to totalitarianism is the stifling of news media. The tactics of the Trump administration and its allies are growing more blunt every week. In January, we saw the arrests of reporters Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering a protest at a church in St. Paul. Earlier, we saw the FBI’s seizure of Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s laptops and phone. These thuggish moves followed Donald Trump’s filing of multi-billion-dollar lawsuits designed to muzzle news organizations, and the administration’s open efforts to browbeat media business owners and journalists themselves into compliance.
When Jeff Bezos purchased the Post in 2013, he was the very opposite of compliant. He remained so even in the face of Trump’s attempts at intimidation. In his memoir, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, former Post executive editor Martin Baron describes the many ways in which Trump sought to punish Bezos for the paper’s coverage of his presidency. “Arguably no non-media company and its chief executive were assailed by Trump more frequently or savagely than Amazon and Bezos,” Baron wrote.
I was Baron’s deputy for most of his tenure and never heard of an instance where Bezos interfered in the work of the newsroom. Despite having extensive business before the government, he never flinched.
BEZOS IN THE SECOND TRUMP TERM is a different story. He killed the Post’s planned editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris eleven days before the 2024 election. His prominent presence at Trump’s inauguration and Amazon’s donation of $1 million to help fund the festivities were evidence of his newfound support for the re-elected president. His decision to focus the Post opinions section on personal liberties and free markets evinced a previously unseen desire to limit and control the paper’s editorial voice. Amazon, where Bezos remains executive chair, has spent $75 million to license and market a film about Melania Trump, putting a fine point on Bezos’s conflicting interests. Just this week, he warmly welcomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to his company Blue Origin’s rocket factory in Florida.
Post readers have rightly concluded that Bezos is no longer committed to the democratic ideals that he once professed to revere and that the newspaper has committed to defend. Hundreds of thousands of subscribers have canceled, eroding revenue and deepening the paper’s financial crisis of recent years.
Now comes the evisceration of the Post’s staff. With a single stroke, Bezos, publisher Will Lewis, and executive editor Matt Murray reportedly cut the newsroom by more than a third, from about 800 journalists to fewer than 500. This massive round of layoffs follows buyouts last year that reduced headcount by 240 across the company.
Murray, in a note to the staff, promised a steady focus on politics, national affairs, and national security. Perhaps that can happen.
Until now, the newsroom has delivered vigorous and revelatory reporting on the administration and a plethora of other topics—even under its leaders’ mismanagement. But it is hard to imagine how the Post will maintain the quality of its news reporting with the decimation inflicted upon it this week.
Bezos, in the early years of his ownership, expressed in childlike terms the moral obligations he felt as the steward of the Washington Post. He said he would never do anything at the Post that would make him feel “icky” when he looked in the mirror in old age and reflected on his life.
Unless he places the Post in the hands of an owner (or owners) willing to face down and fend off Trump’s wrath, that future reckoning will be grim. In the mirror, Jeff Bezos will see a man who grievously weakened an American institution dedicated to freedom and democracy at a time when those very ideals were under enormous threat. If ever America needed the scrutiny of power for which the Washington Post is justly famous, it is this moment. If ever the Post needed a new owner, it is now.
