Bezos, Trump, and the Decline and Fall of THE POST

Hello again—

In Monday’s post, I suggested some ways we could look at Martin Baron’s Collision of Power, the tensions and conflicts in the legacy newsroom of The Washington Post, and the challenging issues that surface from a deep reading of that book. I also promised a quick sequel to Baron’s story, bringing it up to date.

Here we go.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.
—Bill Moyers, June 5, 1934 – June 26, 2025

In early 2023, Martin Baron was able to end Collision of Power on a guardedly optimistic note. Jeff Bezos, he wrote, had kept his hands off the editorial wheel. There were still plenty of problems ahead, but The Post had grown stronger under an owner who seemed to believe in its mission, even when that mission brought heat.

That was 2023. The reviews were overwhelmingly excellent. “All the President's Men for a new generation,” Town & Country wrote. “A closely observed, gripping chronicle of politics and journalism during a decade of turmoil,” according to the New York Times Book Review.

But then came 2024, election year, with all its fast-moving news events, all of it covered with The Post’s usual careful attention. Until late October, just two weeks before the presidential election. That’s when The Post’s publisher and CEO abruptly pulled the plug on the already-drafted endorsement of Kamala Harris.

The backlash was painful and immediate. Over 300,000 subscribers canceled. Three of ten editorial board members resigned, including a Pulitzer Prize winner. Robert Kagan, a longtime opinion editor, called the move “a preemptive bending of the knee.” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the heroes of Watergate, added: “This decision—12 days out from the election—ignores The Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

And Martin Baron came out of retirement to assert, in an interview with NPR: “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos . . . History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Then things got worse.

After the election, Bezos publicly congratulated Trump on “an extraordinary political comeback and a decisive victory.” A few weeks later, at a New York Times symposium, he said, “I’m actually very optimistic this time around... If I can help [Trump] reduce regulation, I’m going to help him.”

And help Trump he did, generously. By December, Bezos-owned Amazon had pledged a $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration kitty, with another $1 million in-kind donation when Amazon’s Prime Video agreed to stream the event.

Amazon Studios also shelled out $40 million for exclusive rights to a Melania Trump documentary—three times the next-highest bid. Rolling Stone called it a “vanity documentary.” Margaret Sullivan, writing in The Guardian, described it as part of a broader “relationship-repairing” strategy by a billionaire hoping to stay in favor. It paid off. Bezos copped a front row seat at the January 20^th inauguration. Behind him, the cabinet officers.

That’s when things really unraveled.

In January, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes left after her cartoon—lampooning media and tech moguls offering bags of money to Trump—was killed by editor David Shipley. She published it on her Substack instead, where you can see the cartoon and read her statement.

In February, Bezos dropped another bombshell, announcing a new direction for the Post’s opinion section, focused exclusively on personal liberties and free markets. “There was a time,” Bezos wrote, “when a newspaper might have seen it as a service to bring a broad-based opinion section to the reader’s doorstep every morning. Today, the internet does that job.” Opinion-page editor David Shipley disagreed. He resigned.

In March, top columnist Ruth Marcus resigned, after The Post’s chief executive and publisher Will Lewis spiked her column critical of Bezos’ new direction for the opinion section. Benjamin Mullin, media reporter for The New York Times, wrote that “the new direction . . . appears to be a rightward shift for the paper.” He added that the new focus “echoes what has long been the informal tagline of The Wall Street Journal’s notably conservative opinion pages: “Free markets, free people.”

In June, Bezos named conservative Adam O’Neal to edit the opinion section. O’Neal, a writer with experience at The Wall Street Journal and RealClearPolitics, pledged to focus on “optimism” and “free market ideas.” The New York Times snarkily observed that O’Neal had been an editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal, “where the opinion pages are reliably conservative.”

Since then, The Post’s letters page has lit up with reader pushback. Longtime subscribers are venting about ideological drift, bland coverage, and print errors. More people are canceling. Meanwhile, The New Yorker reported low morale in the newsroom: the CEO “in hiding,” staff whispering about needing a drink to get through the day, and over 400 Post journalists signing a petition asking Bezos to publicly recommit to editorial independence. Which of course he can’t do, having now pulled the paper so sharply to the right.

Meanwhile, cost-cutting efforts are biting deep. Over 240 layoffs took place in 2023. Another 4% of the workforce was cut in late 2024. And in May, 2025, The Post announced that it has begun offering voluntary buyouts to staffers with more than 10 years’ service. An internal memo from executive editor Matt Murray noted that the move was “part of our ongoing newsroom transformation efforts aimed at reshaping and modernizing the newsroom for the current environment.”

And just this week, the standalone Metro print section was eliminated and folded into Style and Sports—a cut that many will see as a symbolic disconnect with the paper’s past as well as its neighborhood. “A sad day,” sighed journalist Peter Baker. “As a lifelong Washingtonian and veteran of the Metro staff, I always admired The Post’s commitment to covering Washington as a community, not just a capital.”

You could call this a story of two Posts: one still fighting to report the hometown news, the other increasingly reshaped by its owner’s political calculus. Nothing much we can do except stay aware of the evolving situation and vote with our subscription dollars. And (for subscribers) with letters to the editor.

The larger picture is dark and getting darker. Over the last 15 years, 2,100 newspapers have closed, leaving 1,800 communities with no local news outlets. Roughly one-third of American newspapers operating in 2005 have now shuttered. And since 2022, more than 8,000 American journalists have been laid off.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Yes, it does.

“Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.” Yes, it is.

Your Turn
As always, community members are invited to weigh in—whether or not you’ve read Collision of Power (although of course I hope you do). This series is more of a read-along than a book club: slow, observational, and open to detours and side trips. If this last post sparked a thought, a question, or just a quick eye-roll, drop it in the comment box—I’d love to hear it.

• Does any of this change how you see The Post—or media ownership in general?

• Do you still read The Post? Why or why not?

• What should we be asking of legacy newsrooms now?

The July Read-Along

Next up on my Guerrilla Reads list, Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America. MSNBC's legal analyst breaks down the ways disinformation drives voters to extremes, disempowers our courts, and consolidates power. Intrepid readers: you’re invited to read along and comment as you read. I’ll be posting my own thoughts about the book throughout July, with a wrap-up on the fourth Monday, July 28.

And coming in August, the launch of Bitter Taste of Garlic, the digital edition of the first China Bayles mystery, originally published in 1992.

A Note on Collaboration

As you probably know, I’ve co-authored several dozen books with my husband, Bill Albert and others, so writing collaborations aren’t exactly a new thing for me. Collaborations with AI are new, however. This post was co-written with an AI I call Silas, who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, and doesn’t get distracted by the news cycle. I do, which is why I keep him around. In this post, he flagged a few typos, tightened some screws, added some references, and offered a range of title options. If you spot any stumbles, they’re mine, not his. (He told me to say that.)

Silas is part of a broader experiment I’m calling AI Working Notes, in which I try to find out whether collaborating with a machine can sharpen thinking and writing, rather than dull it. So far, the results are . . . um, mixed, but promising. And always interesting. If you’d like to peek behind the curtain—or argue with the ghost in the machine—you’ll find more under the AI Working Notes tab on my Substack. Silas and I are always open to your questions/comments on this intriguing topic.