The reactions to yesterday’s layoffs at the Post have been as predictable as sunrise but few of the people writing them are being honest about it. Take this opinion piece by Margaret Sullivan as an example. Sullivan worked as the Post’s media reporter for a few years and she is outraged about the layoffs.
Would you inherit a rare Stradivarius violin, polish it up for a few years, and then decide to take a hammer to it?
Would you somehow acquire the Hope diamond, set it in a blue velvet case, and then toss the whole thing into the Potomac River?
These incomprehensible acts are not too far afield from what Jeff Bezos is doing these days with the Washington Post, where self-inflicted wounds are wreaking what may be permanent damage to a great newspaper…
…he is doing so at a time when strong, fact-based journalism could not be more important in America and around the world.
A Stradivarius doesn’t lose $100 million a year. Neither does the Hope diamond. These things are valuable because…they’re valuable. The Post is not valuable because in the past three years it has lost more than a quarter billion dollars.
A couple of things about this. First, the Post just fired about 300 people including the entire sports writing staff, the book section and many of their overseas journalists. People obviously like sports and books but is the world desperately in need of strong, fact-based sports reporting? It just feels like the hype over what’s being lost here exceeds the reality by quite a bit. There are other sports outlets covering the topic. Democracy will not die in darkness over this.
Second, Sullivan is refusing to say what she really means, which is that the Post was a center for resistance journalism in Trump’s first term and she wishes they would be again. That’s what she really means by strong, fact-based journalism. She makes that explicit in the very next paragraph.
He should reverse course. He can preserve a great news organization and maybe even recover his own legacy as the paper’s steward – a legacy that was looking good for years until he took a strange, Trump-related bad turn…
When Trump, in his first administration, threatened the Post and disparaged its owner personally, Bezos didn’t buckle.
…this billionaire should turn himself around, heal the self-inflicted wounds, and help Washington Post journalism survive and thrive at this crucial time for American democracy.
It’s not very subtle. Sullivan, who has always been a left-wing hack, wants Bezos to also be a left-wing hack. Re-join the anti-Trump team and take the losses for democracy. That’s exactly what she means. “Strong, fact-based journalism” is code speak for money losing, anti-Trump agitprop.
All of the articles I’ve read are like this. They all basically say Bezos should take a hit for the team. The team being the left-wing writers and the left-wing audience all of whom he has been subsidizing. They praise the Post’s epic journalism and then in the next paragraph they admit it’s all about being anti-Trump. That is in fact what makes it epic. Another example:
Whatever the Post is worth today is immaterial to Bezos’ wealth. It’s barely even what you’d call a rounding error…A man worth more than $240 billion does not care even a little bit, in pure dollar terms, about a $100 million annual loss running a prestige business…
The Post itself doesn’t affect Bezos’ vast fortune much, but what it represents does. One of the employees he laid off on Wednesday was the paper’s Amazon reporter, Caroline O’Donovan. More critically, even under Bezos’ ownership, the Post frequently published stories that upset the Trump administration, whose vindictive approach to regulation could pose obvious problems for Amazon and Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin.
Bezos understood this risk more than a year ago, when he drove away 250,000 paying subscribers by stepping in to prevent the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris. Bezos then transformed the Post’s opinion section, away from a broad-based page and into a propaganda arm devoted to promoting “personal liberties and free markets.”
The Post’s opinion section wasn’t a “broad-based page.” It was a dumpster fire of anti-Trump writers like Jennifer Rubin, Greg Sargent, Dana Milbank, E.J. Dionne and Perry Bacon. When the Post was succeeding during Trump’s first term, this is what was driving the train. It wasn’t great sports journalism or foreign correspondents, it was the constant stream of anti-Trump invective. All of the authors mourning the paper’s death this week think Bezos should have kept funding that at a loss for life.
One more. This one is written by Ashley Parker for the Atlantic. She writes at length about what a wonderful place the Post was for employees, but when it comes to the politics she avoids saying it plainly.
I don’t pretend to have the answers to the Post’s financial woes, or a successful business model for a local paper that is also the nation’s hometown paper. But I can tell you what will be lost if these two men—who don’t seem to understand what the Post was, what it still is, and what it could be—continue to treat it like a distressed asset or a bargaining chip with a president who, ultimately, does not respect bargaining supplicants.
After ranting about the failure of leadership for a bit, Parker offers this paragraph which seems to be simultaneously saying the Post could appeal to more people and that the Post should stick faithfully with it’s current audience (of Trump-hating progressives).
…general-interest publications can be profitable. The New York Times has shown there is money to be made by diversifying, expanding, experimenting, offering something for everyone. (News! Audio! Games! Cooking! Video! Long-form!) The publication you’re reading now is profitable, and has nearly 1.5 million subscribers. Other specialty publications, such as Axios and Punchbowl News, have succeeded by tripling down on the needs and interests of their core audience. The Post, instead, is abandoning its current audience in search of one that may not exist.
So there’s money to be made in expanding and trying new things, but also, a different audience may not exist. Which is it? Parker wants clear leadership from Bezos but she can’t seem to decide in which direction.
Ultimately, they’re all saying the same handful of things. They want the Post to be an anti-Trump outlet for progressives and they want Jeff Bezos to pay for it. The fact that he’s saying no to this demand is an outrage or a tragedy or maybe both. The level of entitlement radiating from these people is blinding.
Keith Olbermann is an exhausting, left-wing kook and also not really so different from the authors quoted above. If Ashley Parker is the left’s presentable, award-winning superego, Olbermann is it’s raving id. He wants Democrats to use the government to destroy Jeff Bezos as a punishment for Bezos turning his back on progressives at the Post. It’s interesting how the same basic message sounds a lot more straight-forward when presented as the rage bait it really is.
AFTER HE KILLED THE WaPOST, WE MUST END THE JEFF BEZOS CARTEL.
Bezos killed that paper to spend the $75m to lie to Trump that his wife was an attractive “movie star.” Dems must use anti-trust to bankrupt him
GET THE NEW THURSDAY COUNTDOWN PODCAST: https://t.co/C4JDFEQDrX pic.twitter.com/0DGubvNNvC
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 5, 2026
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