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Has Jeff Bezos brought down the Washington Post?
00:29:55
The Amazon boss has gutted a third of the workforce at the iconic newspaper
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
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I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom, and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive, but even I've got questions. Join Me Marin Sumpset Webb Every week for my show, Marin talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in depth conversations with fund managers, strategists and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow MarineTalksMoney on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
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A
Who cares if the Washington Post dies? The answer a lot of people, because that newspaper is very famous, famous around the world because once it brought down a president, President Nixon in the early 1970s, the Watergate reporting did for him, and it was bought by Amazon's owner Jeff Bezos, back in 2013. And a few years later he still seemed to be full of optimism about it.
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C
It's not a rare belief, I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light. And I think the Washington Post has a seat, an important seat to do that because we happen to be located here in the capital city of the United States of America.
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That phrase democracy dies in darkness was adopted as the official motto of the Post back in 2017. Jeff Bezos, though, has now announced huge job cuts, a third of the workforce gone. So is the paper that once took down a president now in the pocket of another? Welcome to americast.
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Americast americast from BBC News.
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When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir, right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir.
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The sickest country in the world.
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D
Oh dear. Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry? Of course the President supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question.
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Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? It's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmericasT in London, England.
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And it's Anthony across the pond in the American headquarters of AmericasT in Washington, DC.
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Anthony, kick us off with what the Washington Post is to you, because it's a local paper for you. It was mine for a long time, but it really why does it matter so much in D.C. or why has it mattered so much in D.C?
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D
It does matter in D.C. and it has mattered to me personally and I think a lot of people who live here in Washington, yes, it's the Washington Post and everyone talks about the big political stories. It's broken and Its kind of role in the nation dating all the way back to Watergate. But it also is the local hometown paper. It's a connection to the community. It has sports coverage covering all the major sports teams, like college teams. It has metro coverage, so covering city hall and covering things that happen In Washington D.C. it has cultural coverage about the social events and things that are happening that are important to people who actually physically live in Washington. So like many newspapers, like traditionally local newspapers, it has served a role, a unifying role in Washington life. Not the Washington D.C. on TV, on the evening news, but for people who live here and socialize here, get married here, have kids here, all of that.
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A
And I use the dramatic word dies when I was introducing us. Is it dead? Is it dying? Is that what has happened to it?
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D
I think it's wounded and maybe mortally so. Because what has been cut out in these latest force reductions is what makes the Washington Post a community newspaper. The sports coverage, the local news coverage, the metro coverage. I mean, we could get political journalism, good political journalism, a lot of different places, covering the White House, covering Trump, covering big national issues. New York Times, Politico, Wall Street Journal, ap, they all do that. The Washington Post. What's being lost here is the stuff that matter to people who live here.
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A
Yeah, so it's partly that, isn't it? The non coverage of D.C. they say they're downsizing the metro desk, but it's as you say, the sports department going completely, the books going completely. They've laid off 30% of all their employees, including people on the business side, 300 of roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom. And then really incredibly. And this got a lot of publicity in the days when it happened, didn't it? Partly brought about because the people themselves complained and said they didn't have the money to get home. In some cases, they chucked out a lot of people who were based abroad for the Washington Post, including the woman based in Kyiv.
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D
Yeah. The Post was one of the few news outlets, American news outlets with a global footprint. Most newspapers had cut back their foreign coverage, relying on AP or Reuters or other news services to cover the world. The Post was different. They had a lot of reporters all over the world. And front page stories time and time again were coming from their reporters. Whether it was in Kiev, as you mentioned, or in Asia or in South America or elsewhere in the Middle east. They were generating a headline, generating front page news, and they're cutting that back as well. And I think the 300 number you mentioned, I mean, that may underestimate it because there's a 300 union workers at the Washington Post, Guild members, there may be more freelance people, people who are working on contracts, people who are not covered by the union who have also been laid off. So I've seen upwards of half of the active journalists at the Post are gone. And this isn't the first cut. They had already been cutting back their staffing over recent years and just last year they consolidated the paper, the print paper that I would get at my home. So you had the front page section instead of Metro and Sports and Style, which is kind of the lifestyle section and, and business, they had packed that all into one. So really the paper was greatly reduced even before these latest cuts. Basically a two section paper where you'd have to dig deep into that second section to find business coverage or local coverage or sports.
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A
It's worth quoting Lizzie Johnson, the woman who's based in Kiev, for whom this was obviously a complete surprise because she said on X I was just laid off by the Washington Post in the middle of a war zone. I have no words. I'm devastated. And there are other foreign correspondents who similarly reacted like that and reacted, it would seem, with surprise. There was a Brit, wasn't there, because he's gone now. But the chief executive, Will Lewis, had a history in British papers and has now left. But he said there were difficult decisions to ensure the sustainable future of the Post. So I suppose the challenge to all of that, including that journalist based in Kyiv, is it wasn't a successful newspaper. It just commercially wasn't working. The things that Jeff Bezos said could happen when he took it over and when he said those words that we recently heard back in 2016, that it.
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D
Hasn'T worked right, it wasn't making money. And the New York Times has found a way to make money through games and through recipes and other add ons. But the Post was losing money. Now, when you were as rich as Jeff Bezos, it was a rounding error, the amount of money they were losing, but still it was something that was costing financially. It wasn't self sustaining. So in some ways that is a valid point and it's not a point that's unique to the Washington Post. Newspapers all over this country have had to greatly reduce themselves, cut their staff, cut their footprint because they were not making money and the business model simply wasn't working. But there was a feeling that the Washington Post, because of Bezos, because it was the Washington Post, was somehow immune. And you mentioned Will Lewis, who has since resigned. He wasn't even there on the announcement of these cuts, the way that Washington Post staffers learned about them was via email that if they got if they still had their job or not. And the group announcement did not involve the publisher, who actually the next day was over in California at a Super bowl red carpet event. So there was a lot of criticism of how he handled it. And of course, Bezos hasn't said anything publicly about it either. So not just a tragedy for a lot of Washington Post employees, people who were working there for decades, people have been winning Pulitzer Prizes who have been creating breaking news on the national and local level. But it's also just a tragedy for the paper writ large and for how they handled this layoff.
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And it's worth emphasizing, isn't it, the plans that Bezos had and the boasts that he made about how successful it was going to be. So he bought it for $250 million, didn't he? Which as you say, a rounding error. Not a lot of money to pay for it back in half a yacht in 2013. Yeah, half a yacht. He bought it for half a yacht back in 2013. And it's worth listening to what he said in those 2016 comments. So three years after he'd bought it, he was still mighty positive about it, to put it mildly. Let's listen in.
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C
We need to take the Washington Post from being a great local paper, which was a very successful strategy for decades, and, and transform it into a great national and global paper. And we have that capability. We can do that. And as we did that, we're going to take change the revenue structure. We've historically made a relatively large amount of money per reader on a relatively small number of readers. And we need instead to make a relatively small amount of money per reader on a much larger number of readers. And that the Internet, if you are studying the news business, the Internet has been a disaster for traditional news companies for the most part. And it's because it takes a lot of things away. There are a lot of kind of anti gifts that the Internet brought to the traditional news business. But it does bring one huge gift. And you have to maximize your usage of that new gift, which is that it provides all almost free global distribution. And so that's how you can get. We can have hundreds of millions of readers and make very little money and have an amazing institution. And I'm happy to fund that until we get there.
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And he's not wrong. I mean, he makes some valid points there about the challenges that the news business faces, the opportunities that it presents. And during the first four years of the Trump administration, when Bezos already had ownership of the paper, the Washington Post actually did really well. They invested a lot of money in their news coverage. They expanded their newsroom. They moved from an older office building to a new one right on K Street, not too far from here. And you saw in their global subscription numbers, national subscription numbers, a lot of people willing to pay for the content, which included robust coverage of the Trump administration. And that slogan which they adopted about democracy dying in darkness. I mean, they had done a decent job of positioning themselves during that first four years of Trump's presidency as exactly what Bezos said there. A national global newspaper that was. Expanded its audience just beyond Washington, D.C. and local readers like myself.
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A
Yeah, and then things changed, didn't they? Somewhere along the line, and particularly after Donald Trump left power and when he was campaigning to get back, it looks as if Bezos became, in a sense, more interested in Trump than in the paper. Is that a fair way of putting it?
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D
I think more attuned to the possibility of Trump coming back. The news business, and we can see it from our own traffic figures here at the BBC, but globally and here in the US People kind of lost interest in politics, or at the very least, their attention and their willingness to consume news stories, dipped when Donald Trump was defeated in 2020. Understandably so. Joe Biden was a much less dramatic president on a number of different areas. So the challenge for the news business was to try to. Try to continue to grow your audience, hold that audience that you had while dealing with a shrinking pie. Then it became clear that Trump was going to come back and that Trump had a list of people that he was going to punish, his retribution list, and was going to be doing, had plans for a much more aggressive presidency his second term. And I think there you touch on it, that Bezos became sensitive to what Trump was planning and adjusted his strategy to be less confrontational, not confrontational the way the Post was in the first term, something different. And we saw signs of that even before Trump won reelection in 2024, with the decision that was instigated by Bezos to tank a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris by the paper's editorial board, which we talked about at the time as a. As a fairly dramatic about face that happened almost without any kind of preparation or announcement shortly before Election Day.
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It's worth listening to Martin Barron on that. So Martin Barron was editor of the paper from 2013 to 2021. So a lot of it under Jeff Bezos. Let's listen to him.
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That alienated so many of the readers of the Post because it was a transparent effort to not to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump at that point, but. But to not offend Donald Trump at that point. And hundreds of thousands of subscribers abandoned the Post and his activities subsequent to that. Alienated, definitely alienated subscribers. The fact that he appeared during the inauguration on the stage with Donald Trump. The fact that Amazon bought, for an exorbitant price, the documentary of Melania Trump. The fact that it acquired the rights to the Apprentice television series in which Donald Trump starred and that he. He receives a substantial portion of that money. And then the decision to totally remake the opinion pages in which they essentially excluded all. All columnists who were to the left of center, even slightly to the left of center. And they remade the editorials as well to sort of push this sort of libertarian ideology that corresponds to Jeff Bezos's own ideology. But they softened all the criticism of Donald Trump. They constantly were taking a knock at Democrats for often no good reason. That that editorial page today really lacks a moral core.
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Yeah, he ticks through a lot of the criticisms and bullet points that people have presented. If you read the editorial page, the official voice of the Washington Post now, it is decidedly more conservative than it was under Barron in the first four years of Trump's presidency from 2016 to 2020. So a dramatic change among all of that we just heard about the Melania documentary, the change in their kind of tone of their coverage, all of it shows that Bezos has remade the Washington Post. And as you mentioned, Justin, that comes with a price. I think about 250,000 subscribers canceled after that Kamala Harris endorsement. And when you build your subscription model, as they did in the first four years of Trump's presidency, to be a national and global paper that. That confronts power and talks about democracy dying in darkness and shines a light on Donald Trump, when all of a sudden you seem to be moving away from that and being more sympathetic towards Trump. A lot of those people who signed up are going to go away. And that's exactly what happened, you think.
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In the New York Times and the changes that were made at the New York Times to get it commercially onto a good footing. The recipes and all this stuff that you can subscribe to around the world. And I've got family members who give inordinate amounts of money to the New York Times for the various things that you can sort of subscribe to that business model. Again, you'd think Jeff Bezos, of all People would be up for that sort of thing. But it didn't come, did it? And again, Marty Baron, that former editor, I thought was really interesting on that.
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You know, this has been described as a reset, but it looks more like a retreat because a reset. I would expect them to announce some new innovative initiatives, some new things that they're doing that are imaginative, that are creative, that offer the promise of financial stability and growth. And I didn't hear any of that. All I heard was less. So I'm not sure exactly what the appeal of that is. I'd like to hear some vision, and I didn't hear much of a vision today.
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D
Yeah, they had advanced some ideas over the past couple of years to invest more in a new kind of newsroom that did events and used AI and focused on different kinds of storytelling, and none of that panned out. So now they cut back, as Marty Baron points out there, and are still expecting people to pay the same amount of money for less of a product, which I think that's been their. The real challenge. They aren't putting forward some sort of an idea of what the Post should be with this new restructuring.
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See, if I was Jeff Bezos, and I'm not, I would spend a little bit more money on it. I'd turn it into a thing. Because the classic reason a wealthy person buys a newspaper and it's usually wealthy men, isn't it? And you think right back through history, I mean, the obvious counterpoint to all of this is Rupert Murdoch, isn't it? Who's still got the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post and papers in Britain, et cetera, but for a purpose. I mean, number one, obviously cares about newspapers, but number two, wants to be part of the conversation, wants to influence people, wants to have that sort of ability to influence affairs that you only get through a newspaper or you only got through a newspaper in the past. Jeff Bezos buys the paper and then doesn't seem to have any interest in doing the things that traditionally you would do in that circumstance. That's what I don't understand about him.
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D
Maybe Bezos realized how exposed Amazon writ large is to Washington and to the presidency and to Trump's particular influences, and made the decision that it wasn't worth trying to keep the Washington Post the way it is. The risks were too great. The numbers that Amazon gets from the federal government, billions of dollars for Amazon Web Services and other things that they provide the government, I mean, that makes Amazon very vulnerable to a federal government that becomes hostile to Bezos and to Amazon. And we saw that actually in Trump's first term where they gave this massive defense contract to someone else instead of Amazon. And while it wasn't clear that the reason was because Trump doesn't like the Washington Post, a lot of people interpreted it that way. And so the warnings were there. And so it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to say Bezos made that determination when it became clearer and clearer that Trump could win the White house back in 2024 and reoriented his business to acknowledge that. And the Washington Post is what paid the price.
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A
Yeah. And just to double down on that. So Amazon Cloud Services having those big contracts with the US Federal government, a lot of money coming to Amazon, but also now the military awarding government contracts to Blue Origin. Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos Space technology company. And Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, as he now styles himself, went to those facilities in Florida just earlier this month. And it's really worth hearing what Hegseth had to say because this, in a sense is probably the answer to my question, which you've also sort of answered, which is why Jeff Bezos, why Jeff Bezos changed his mind, if he did change his mind about the relative importance of the Washington Post vis a vis other business interests. Let's listen to Pete Hegseth.
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We live in a realistic world where American strength has to partner with American manufacturing. And if you don't have both, you don't have a free country and you have to have world class manufacturing. Let me tell you this, take your cameras through this factory. And what I said to Mr. Bezos was this might be some of the most sophisticated manufacturing the world has ever seen. That can only be done at scale in the United States of America. No more business as usual, Which I know, Mr. Bezos, is music to your ears. You've never done business as usual. And at the War Department, business as usual is over.
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A
And I suppose when you listen to that, Anthony, that there is a big difference, isn't there, between Bezos and Rupert Murdoch? I mean, albeit one of the differences is Bezos is even richer than Rupert Murdoch. But Rupert Murdoch doesn't have those kind of business interests to defend, does he? And Murdoch is just so much more of a traditional media person, albeit he can come under pressure from the Trump administration. Indeed he is. The Wall Street Journal is being sued, isn't it, by Donald Trump. But at the same time, he doesn't have that wider nexus of stuff that could be really imperiled by Donald Trump. So that could account, I suppose, for the difference why Murdoch is still very much, you think of the Wall Street Journal really leading the way, in a sense, actually of stories that are embarrassing for Donald Trump, in spite of Rupert Murdoch's occasional closeness to him. And he attends dinners with him and all the rest of it, and is on the right of politics. But that relationship, that Bezos Trump relationship, just doesn't exist for Murdoch.
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D
Right. Journalism is risky business, doing journalism. Right? I mean, telling the truth to power, holding those in power to account, writing stories and coming up with television segments and investigations that make people in power uncomfortable, that reveal uncomfortable truths, that cause people in power to feel threatened because they don't want these stories out. I mean, that is risky. And we've seen it in multiple different media outlets. The BBC, Wall Street Journal, as you mentioned, abc, cnn, cbs, they've all had to deal with Trump's ire. And the organizations that have, as you mentioned, larger corporate interests are the ones that seem to be the most under pressure to change their orientation because of the risks that that presents, as you mentioned, to the larger kind of commercial enterprises. Now, Jeff Bezos has come out with a statement about why they made these cuts, and he did say that the Post has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity. Each and every day, our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus. So he hasn't provided whole details about what he wants for the Post, but he has said that they're going to use data to try to choose a direction. The question is, where does that direction take the Post? And at least at this point, it's not clear. But it is clear, however, that there are external pressures on Bezos and the Washington Post that are changing this course beyond just the data that they're getting from readers.
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A
Yeah, I mean, I think you just captured it there, haven't you, with that Bezos statement? But also what you were saying as well, about the job of journalism, which Murdoch gets. Murdoch is a mischief maker and an outsider, and Bezos just isn't, is he? He's not either of those things. And you could tell from that statement, which, I mean, was it written by AI? I didn't really understand a word of it. Murdoch wouldn't write a statement like that. There is just a real difference, isn't there, between the. The personalities of the people and the approach is more than personality, the whole approach to life of those two, which it seems to me is really crucial. And of course, there's another question as well, Anthony, which is whether Any of this really matters. Who cares about newspapers in 2026? People get their news from elsewhere, from social media, from tv. In fact, I think I'm right in saying most now. Isn't social media the biggest new source for most Americans now? And I mean, it seems to me there is a case to be made that it does. But when you look at the stories that cause politicians difficulties, and we've both mentioned the Wall Street Journal, which is, I mean, I should declare an interest here in as much as Emma Tucker, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, an English woman, is a very good friend of mine, but I think she's brilliant. And I'm not the only person to think that. And she is absolutely. She wants to make mischief. She wants to find out stuff. And she's done it in the Trump administration and caused real difficulties for Donald Trump to the extent that he is now suing the paper. But interestingly, of course, she also did it in the Biden administration and came under a lot of pressure. I'm not giving away any confidence. I think when I say that she did come under pressure from other journalists to go easy on Joe Biden, and the Wall Street Journal didn't go easy on Joe Biden and was very keen to report his failings towards the end of his time in office. And it's that sort of thing that you lose, don't you, if the owner's just not interested in the paper doing that.
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D
Right. And yeah, you mentioned the Wall Street Journal is being sued and they aren't folding, they are taking it to court. They're fighting it out. I mean, compare to the recent story here in Washington about the Post reporter who had gotten information from a Defense Department contractor about cutbacks, and she had her apartment searched. She had her phone and electronic devices seized by the Justice Department, and it was viewed as a threat to the First Amendment, to the Post's journalistic freedom. And where was Jeff Bezos? He didn't have a statement at all defending this reporter and defending the Washington Post. He kept his head down, whereas, you know, where Rupert Murdoch stands on press freedom. I mean, it's a remarkable contrast, isn't.
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A
It worth saying, finally, the guy in the Oval Office is a fan of newspapers. I mean, he's obsessed with them, isn't he? And his own face being in them.
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D
As much as he bashes the New York Times and he invites like four or five New York Times report reporters in and talks with them for two hours. He does. He's old school. I mean, he's older than us. He grew up with us. He grew up in New York City, one of the last places in the US with a kind of a vibrant, still print newspaper, competitive print newspaper business. So I can totally understand him still having a place in his heart for newspapers, even as much as he bashes them and he craves their coverage and their praise. It is certainly it kind of dates us to sit around talking about the value of newspapers because my kids don't read them. I would force my teenager to read the front page of the Washington Post, just stay across kind of a curated selection of news. But it makes us dinosaurs even at our relatively younger age.
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Speak for yourself. We better go and have our cocoa. It's probably past our bedtime. Anthony Pleasure.
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D
Bye all.
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Bye bye. Thank you for listening to another episode. It is you, the Ameracaster, that makes AmericasT the community that it now is. If you like what you've heard, please do subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. We always want to hear your feedback as well. We look at every single bit of correspondence that we get so you can send us an email. AmericaSTBC.co.uk the WhatsApp is 443-301-239480 and you can get involved in the AmericaST Discord server. The link to that is in the description. Till next time, bye.
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Foreign.
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I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom, and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive, but even I've got questions. Join Me Marin Sumpset Web Every week for my show, Marin Talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in depth conversations with fund managers, strategists and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow MarineTalksMoney on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.