Under orders from Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, The Washington Post laid off a third of its staff Wednesday, eliminating or hollowing out its coverage of international news, books, local news and sports. “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone,” Ukraine correspondent Lizzie Johnson wrote on X, next to a photo of her writing a report by headlamp in a car. “I have no words. I’m devastated.”
Since the advent of the internet, there has rarely been a day of good news about the news industry itself — but Wednesday’s bloodbath feels particularly bleak. What’s happening at the Post is the latest example of a billionaire oligarch devastating our information environment and, with it, our democracy. And it underscores how we’re approaching a tipping point in the decline in national institutional media — for which independent media cannot easily substitute.
When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchased the Post in 2013, he was hailed by many as a “white knight” whose extraordinary wealth and business acumen would be a boon for one of the great American broadsheets.
For most of his tenure, Bezos reportedly let editors run the paper without interference. But then, apparently spurred by changes in the political winds, he became heavy-handed. In fall 2024, with Trump’s potential return to the White House looming, Bezos himself quashed the paper’s editorial endorsing then-Vice President Kamala Harris for president. Then, a cartoonist resigned after she said her depiction of Bezos — and other billionaires — kneeling before Trump was rejected. And the paper gutted its opinion section to become more friendly to the right and to silence progressive dissent. None of the changes can be explained by Bezos’ concerns about fiscal health; covering the Post’s losses are an infinitesimal fraction of his wealth. The changes reflect his personal priorities.
We are in an acutely dangerous place when huge swaths of the media ecosystem are owned by untouchably rich people.
Bezos’ gutting of the Post comes as biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong is pushing the Los Angeles Times to the right, and the billionaire Ellison family is transforming CBS News into a MAGA-friendly news operation. This is to say nothing of the social media sector, where mega-billionaire Elon Musk wrecked Twitter, Meta’s weather vane billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg alters algorithms depending on who controls the government and TikTok is now partially in the hands of billionaire Trump allies.
We are in an acutely dangerous place when huge swaths of the media ecosystem are owned by untouchably rich people. Their primary interest is in enriching themselves using their highly profitable assets, and they possess no obligation to protect democratic norms if it doesn’t strike their fancy. Most of them are decidedly not in the mood these days: During this authoritarian turn, the capitalist class has found that muzzling politico-intellectual freedom is a way to curry favor with the president and protect their bottom line.
The news industry is in such abysmal shape that it’s hard to envision where the Post’s more than 300 laid-off talented editors and reporters will land. For years, jobs have been vanishing in news media without new ones to replace them.
It’s now common to see journalists turn to the increasingly popular medium of paid newsletters to write in an independent and individual capacity. I appreciate it as an enterprising move, but it will not and cannot replace what is being lost.
Major media institutions that pursue impartial, fact-based reporting are part of the lifeblood of a functioning democracy — and they require a tremendous amount and a tremendous coordination of resources. Such newsrooms employ reporters with regional and issue-based expertise who develop rolodexes of sources and experts in government, business and civil society. These reporters are backed with budgets to travel, develop contacts and dig up facts. They’re supported and mentored by armies of editors who help ensure reporting clarity, fairness, factual accuracy and the maintenance of consistent standards for vetting information and communicating it.
Such media institutions are also staffed with lawyers to ensure they comply with the law and to help protect the reporters from people who want to silence them. Major media outlets cover issues when they’re not hot in the news cycle, including slow-burn, deep-dive investigations that might not generate tons of interest, but are essential to holding power to account.
Unfortunately, this model is not something that can be replicated by writers forming countless individual outlets through paid newsletters or blogs. Writers in these settings generally have no editors and they have far fewer resources to support or protect them. They cannot generally afford to cover niche beats or matters outside the major thoroughfares of the attention economy. They are more vulnerable to litigation. And they are far less efficient from a consumer perspective — newspaper subscriptions offer the work of many, many more writers per dollar. Ultimately, newsletters are significantly more well-suited to analysis and commentary, but there needs to be enough quality reporting out there for those writers to have things to comment on.
On a bigger-picture level, a hyperfragmented media sector will only cause America’s social trust crisis, already colossal, to grow exponentially. Major media outlets with huge brand names are not only uniquely good at documenting events, but they’re also widely trusted when they share their accounts of them. There is no way to replicate that with a million blogs with little to no name recognition, and it will become harder to establish a shared reality.
Today, in a world awash in government disinformation, mindless social media tribalism, artificial intelligence slop and foreign bots, it is indescribably precious to have major institutions that can be relied upon as truth-tellers. Unfortunately, many of our media-controlling oligarchs look at these institutions as toys or just another way to boost their bottom line.
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