On Wednesday afternoon, what was long anticipated finally became reality: Darkness set in on democracy.
Or, at least, that’s how The Washington Post’s laughable slogan would frame it. After shedding readers and bleeding money for years, the capital’s putative newspaper of record announced it would be cutting a third of its workforce and eliminating entire sections of the paper.
According to NPR, while the sports and books section of the paper will be closed and the international desk reduced dramatically, the layoffs will hit every sector of the outlet’s workforce.
Executive editor Matt Murray said the move was “a strategic reset” in the AI era due to “difficult and even disappointing realities” and the fact that the paper wasn’t keeping up with the times.
“With the job cuts, the storied newspaper narrows the scope of its ambitions for the foreseeable future. It is a remarkable reversal for a vital pillar of American journalism that had looked to Bezos — one of the wealthiest people on Earth — as a champion and a financial savior,” NPR noted.
As with NPR and the financial cuts that it’s faced thanks to government cuts, the tale of woe spelled out in that paragraph is only about half true.
Bezos, of course, is still the paper’s financial savior, and the WaPo’s red ink is more or less a rounding error for him. However, he also views it as a business interest, not a charity — and either way, it would have to perform to be worth the money. It isn’t performing.
The main issue is that the “vital pillar of American journalism” part probably should be in the past tense, and the changes weren’t just long overdue, but long threatened if the paper’s notoriously woke staff didn’t start putting together a product people were willing to read and/or pay for.
Since the paper is privately held, subscription and readership data aren’t publicly available, but data guru Nate Silver noted in a Substack post that another issue wasn’t so much that the paper wasn’t keeping up with the times, but the capital-T Times — which is to say, The New York Times.
Using publicly available data from Memeorandum — “which algorithmically tracks which news and politics stories other people are linking to,” Silver noted in the piece, published last week — he noted that the Post supercharged its coverage during Trump’s first term in office, but fell off dramatically during the course of 2024. While the Times recovered, the Post seems to have cratered.
When Bezos completed the purchase of the Post in 2013, Memorandum data show the paper was far behind the Times, with the NYT taking 10.7 percent of Memorandum links vs. 5.8 percent for the Post. Then came the Democracy Dies in Darkness™ era — and, at its peak, in 2019, the Post was far ahead of the Times, with 14.8 percent of shares vs. 11.0 percent for the Times.
It maintained that lead throughout much of the Biden presidency, but both lefty staples fell off dramatically over the course of 2023 and 2024. While both saw spikes in the summer of 2024 as an assassination attempt on then-GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump and the replacement of Joe Biden on the ticket gave people reason to read and share, the Times was still ahead, 9.6 to 6.9 percent.
Since then, the papers have gone in opposite directions, with the Times at 14 percent of shares in 2026 against 5.4 percent for the Post.
What’s the why here? Liberals will point to the fact that Bezos hasn’t been willing to dump in the massive sums they want and corporate influence led the paper to not endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, leading to leftists performatively cancelling their subscriptions.
Bezos has still been willing to dump in scads of money, however, and part of the problem is that both the Times and The Wall Street Journal, not to mention various cable and internet outlets, have been able to foster the kind of connections with Washington lawmakers only the Post used to be privy to, while the Times has successfully pivoted to being a lifestyle magazine as well as a news source.
The Post still seems stuck in some sort of Woodward-and-Bernstein cosplay, meanwhile, only with a more stringent diversity mandate than in the “All the President’s Men” era.
Furthermore, the problems at the paper predated the decision not to endorse Kamala Harris, or even her replacing Joe Biden atop the ticket. In June of 2024, with the paper reportedly having lost $100 million the prior year, publisher Will Lewis announced via a conference call that executive editor Sally Buzbee had been summarily dismissed and Murray brought in for a turnaround.
During a call with staff in which numerous wokeistas complained about “four white men running three newsrooms” and whether “we need our brilliant social journalists and service journalists as embedded in our core product to make sure that people are actually reading the thing that’s out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post,” Lewis dropped what the kids like to call a Truth Bomb™ on them.
“We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore. So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best,” he said. “You haven’t done it … I’ve listened to the platitudes. Honestly, it’s just not happening.”
At the time, one staffer of the Post lamented “that Will Lewis keeps going to his network rather than plucking Washington Post leadership” and that Buzbee was “being replaced by more white men we don’t know.”
Well, now the old joke about the Washington Post’s headline if the world were about to end really has come true, if we were to believe this staffer’s vision about what was going to happen to their beloved paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness; Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.”
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