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One Franklin Square, home of the Washington Post newspaper in downtown Washington. Alamy Stock Photo
democracy dies in darkness
From white knight to grim reaper Bezos guts the Washington Post
Once cast as a saviour of American journalism, Bezos now appears willing to hollow out a great newspaper in exchange for proximity to power, writes Marion McKeone.
LAST UPDATE | 8 Feb
WHAT DOES IT profit a multi-billionaire if he owns a hefty chunk of the world – and a stake in the galaxy beyond — but sells his soul?
Wednesday’s announcement that Jeff Bezos, currently the third-richest man in the world, had fired more than one-third of the Washington Post’s workforce was greeted with a mix of fury and incredulity – and a soupçon of black humour — as the White Knight who rode to the rescue of America’s most revered newspaper became its Grim Reaper. “We’re rewriting his obituary as we speak,” one reporter told me.
That Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Bezos would trade his reputation for a promise of future enrichment from the Trump administration is not surprising; he built his empire on billions of cut-price transactions for subpar goods.
A year ago, Bezos’ net worth was put at $245 billion. At the time of writing, it had nudged up to $254 billion. To be your own Judas for such a measly sum is perhaps the clearest indication that in Trump’s Washington, integrity has been accorded junk bond status.
Trump’s man
Since October 2024, when it became apparent that Trump was on track to return to the White House, Bezos has strategically spent his way into the good graces of his former nemesis. His seven-figure donation to the Inaugural Fund earned him a ringside seat alongside his fellow broligarchs. He’s one of the chief contributors to Trump’s ballroom fund, the gilded folly that, if realised, will almost certainly double as a mausoleum for its donors’ reputations.
Another $75 million was spent on the universally ridiculed Amazon documentary about Melania Trump – including a $28 million payment to the First Lady. He could have saved himself $50 million by simply writing her a no-strings-attached cheque.
But public displays of abject servitude are the point for Trump. He’s not interested in discreet donations from Bezos, Cook, Zuckerberg or Musk. He demands the craven loyalty, the fulsome praise of those who previously reserved their flattery for the Obamas. Or the Clintons. Or the Kennedys.
It’s unsurprising that in an era when armed and masked federal ICE thugs in the US are sending toddlers to deportation camps, beating protesters to a pulp whilst blinding them with tear gas and pepper spray, and executing American citizens in broad daylight, the freedom of the press in the United States has never been under such a sustained assault.
Gutting the news
If these were ordinary times – and the difference between a Republican and Democratic president was a tax cut or a fistful of nuisance regulations – the gutting of a reputable newspaper by a skinflint billionaire would be a bitter pill to swallow.
Against a backdrop of advancing authoritarianism, it casts an altogether more sinister shadow, more akin to a strategic act of appeasement than a hard-nosed business decision.
Make no mistake, the Washington Post is circling the drain. A decade ago, 1100 journalists worked in its newsroom, opinion, sports, metro, arts and foreign sections. New readers were flocking to a newly revitalised paper – partly due to the ‘Trump bump’ that buoyed all media during his first term and partly because of Bezos’s much needed investment and Marty Baron’s stewardship as editor.
But the Trump bump had dissipated by late 2021, and once again, the Post started to take on water. Despite his protestations of treating the newspaper like a favourite child, Bezos wasn’t inclined to use his fortune to keep it afloat. $70 million in losses in 2023 jumped to $100 million in 2024.
Decisions by Bezos in late 2024 and early 2025 turned the trickle of cancelled subscriptions into a flood. Days before the November election, he ordered the editorial section to spike its endorsement of Kamala Harris, prompting 250,000 readers to cancel their subscriptions. His insistence on pulling a cartoon that mocked him and other tech billionaires for grovelling to Trump triggered more resignations and subscription cancellations.
Another, more catastrophic decision, came after Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Bezos decreed that Post’s editorial section would change its focus from political commentary to ‘free markets and personal liberties’. The most blatant move to silence criticism of Trump prompted the immediate resignation of Bill Shipley, the editorial page editor, along with his most prestigious – and widely read – commentators.
The risible management of Will Lewis and Matt Murray, Murdoch News Corp transplants hired by Bezos over the protests of the newsroom and section editors, accelerated the paper’s demise. Subscriptions soon dropped to 50% of their 2017 levels. Long before Wednesday’s slashing of the foreign desk, sports, metro and book sections, buyouts in 2023 and 2025 cut another 300 jobs.
For now, the paper will limp on, with less than half its pre-2023 workforce. But gutting a newspaper doesn’t just cost subscribers; the number of advertisers dwindles in proportion to the reduction in content.
Status symbol
Bezos has done a 180-degree turn on his own philosophy. When he bought the paper in 2013, he argued against cost-cutting. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
In conversations this week, several Washington media insiders defended Bezos. If he really was doing Trump’s bidding, they assured me, he’d have gutted the investigative reporting, national security and political desks, the sections that have inflicted the most damage on the Trump administration. But with a stated goal of breaking even in 2026, more cuts are inevitable.
It’s naïve to think that Bezos isn’t knowingly leading the paper towards irrelevance, if not outright extinction. It’s a stunning volte face from his willingness to stand up to Trump’s first term excesses. In hindsight, it seems that donning the ‘defender of democracy’ cloak at the Post may have been a strategic move, assuring Bezos’ access to the drawing-rooms of DC’s liberal old guard.
For Bezos, the Post was a cut above his Amazon trading post, the equivalent of a wealthy pig farmer buying a Michelin-starred restaurant. Or Charlie Kushner’s 2006 purchase of The New York Observer, for his dim-bulb son.
The point of splurging $10 million on the irreverent but little-read chronicler of Manhattan’s powerbrokers was not to turn the 25-year-old Jared Kushner into a newspaper mogul; rather, it provided him with a calling card that would allow him to rub shoulders with actual moguls and distance him from the family’s tawdry status as New Jersey slum landlords. And it worked. Kushner destroyed the paper but befriended Rupert Murdoch, married Ivanka Trump, and traded his Trump-whisperer status in the first administration for $2 billion in Saudi seed money.
It seems Bezos was working from a similar song sheet. As owner of the Washington Post, he became something more than the tech geek whose Blue Origin space ambitions failed to launch. He became a Washington DC power broker, with invitations to the sort of dinner parties that no amount of Amazon fulfilment centres would provide.
Now it seems that he has achieved his desired level of access and secured a seat at Trump’s gilded table, he’s willing to torch the vehicle that facilitated his arrival.
For the devastated Washington Post staffers who mull over Bezos’s casual excesses – the taste-no-object $55 million wedding, the $75 million ‘Melania’ fluffer – and wonder at his willingness to gut the Post, the answer may be that Bezos has already got what he came for. And now, there’s more to be gained from the Post’s decimation than its survival.
Bezos emblazoned ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ on the Post’s masthead in February 2017, weeks after Trump’s first inauguration. Weeks after his second inauguration, it may be time for a change of slogan.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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