“It’s an absolute bloodbath,” said one employee.
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The Washington Post, owned by the billionaire Jeff Bezos, has laid off approximately one-third of its employees, raising renewed fears about the resilience of US democracy – and its media – to withstand Donald Trump’s attacks.
Marty Baron, the Post’s former executive editor, called it “among the darkest days” for the paper and castigated Bezos for his “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump”.
It’s the latest in a series of highly controversial decisions at the Post by Bezos, the founder of Amazon – which, the day after the firings were announced, revealed plans to spend $200bn in one year on artificial intelligence and robotics. Amazon also paid $75m to make and market Melania, a new documentary about the US first lady.
Last year, the Post lost at least a quarter of a million subscribers and faced internal uproar after the paper – at Bezos’ request, according to the newspaper’s reporters – chose not to endorse any candidate in the US presidential election for the first time in 30 years.
At the time Susan Rice, a former US ambassador to the UN and former domestic policy adviser for the Biden administration, called the decision “the most hypocritical, chicken-shit move from a publication that is supposed to hold people in power to account”.
The Post was sold to Bezos in 2013, and under him the paper introduced a new slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness”.
The Guardian journalist Paul Owen said: “The paper’s journalists will be hoping these job cuts don’t leave it looking darker than ever.”
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