Layoffs at the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos are a dire warning for journalism and government accountability
We need to start paying attention to the cumulative effect of the thousand tiny cuts slowly killing us. In the last decade, our country has changed so much as to be unrecognizable to those of us who came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Yes, I am dating myself.
I say this while fully realizing that in my callow youth, National Guardsmen killed protestors at Kent State University, and that police shot and killed activists at numerous protests and riots. I saw it on television. I read about it in the newspapers. I witnessed some events myself.
I say this remembering the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John and Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X. I say this remembering the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the threat of global annihilation. School busing to achieve integration. The New York Yankees, UCLA basketball, the Boston Celtics and the Green Bay Packers.
And I make this claim and offer the warning because today you can no longer even get sports news in the . This week Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post — the publication that broke the Watergate scandal — decided to kill the newspaper. Forgive me if I think the two news stories are linked and represent the culmination of everything the far-right has tried to do to the press since Richard Nixon irrevocably stained national politics.
Bezos remains one of the richest people on the planet. But he has no stomach to invest in or improve the , which costs him pennies on the dollar. He lacks the grit and, more importantly, the civic responsibility to improve the Post.
Bezos remains one of the richest people on the planet. But he has no stomach to invest in or improve the , which costs him pennies on the dollar. He lacks the grit and, more importantly, the civic responsibility to improve the Post. Instead he has the grift and social responsibility of Donald Trump. Thus the mass layoffs, more than 300 in all, or 30% of the paper’s workforce, that were announced on Wednesday.
“These layoffs are not inevitable,” the Guild said in a statement. “A newsroom cannot be hollowed out without consequences for its credibility, its reach and its future.”
In its own statement, the Post characterized the move as part of “a number of difficult but decisive actions [being taken] today for our future.” The intent is purportedly “to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets The Post apart and, most importantly, engages our customers.”
Executive Editor Matt Murray said, “We can’t be everything to everyone.” However, it looks like the Post can instead be nothing to everyone — and that’s where it is headed.
Coming from Louisville, I grew up with the words of Robert Worth Bingham thrust at me every time I walked into the Courier-Journal headquarters: “I have always regarded the newspapers owned by me as a public trust and have endeavored so to conduct them as to render the greatest public service.”
Or perhaps you prefer fiction. There’s Charles Foster Kane, an extremely rich, crusading newspaper owner who is chided by a friend for losing more than a million dollars a year. Kane smiles and says at that rate he might have to worry in 60 years.
The in reality is not as good as the fiction of “Citizen Kane,” let alone Bingham’s reality. If Bezos had any of that pluck, we certainly would not be reading about the Post’s pending demise.
The decisions made by Bezos and his team weren’t made to stop the bleeding, but rather to bring about the quick execution of the venerable newspaper. Closing your sports section is self-defeating. Washington, D.C., is a robust sports town, and it deserves more, not less, coverage. Many readers will pick up the newspaper explicitly for the daily local and professional sports coverage and read the rest of the paper later — if at all. That activity is duplicated on many news websites; large numbers of people subscribe solely for local, regional and national sports.
