Has Jeff Bezos brought down the Washington Post?

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0:05Anthony Zurcher:How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250-year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways the US has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:39Who cares if The Washington Post dies? The answer are a lot of people because that newspaper is very famous, famous around the world because once it brought down a president, President Nixon in the early 1970s. The Watergate reporting did for him. It was bought by Amazon's owner Jeff Bezos back in 2013, and a few years later he still seemed to be full of optimism about it.

1:03Anthony Zurcher:It's not a rare belief. I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light. And I think the Washington Post has a seat, an important seat to do that, because we happen to be located here in the capital city of the United States of America. That phrase, democracy dies in darkness, was adopted as the official motto of the Post back in 2017. Jeff Bezos, though, has now announced huge job cuts, a third of the workforce gone. So is the paper that once took down a president now in the pocket of another?

1:44Welcome to AmeriCast.

1:48Anthony Zurcher:AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir. Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world. Oh, dear. Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry? Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

2:15It's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England.

2:19Anthony Zurcher:And it's Anthony across the pond in the American headquarters of AmeriCast in Washington, D.C. Anthony, kick us off with what The Washington Post is to you, because it's a local paper for you. It was mine for a long time, but it really, why does it matter so much in D.C.? Or why has it mattered so much in D.C.? It does matter in D.C., and it has mattered to me personally. And I think a lot of people who live here in Washington, yes, it's The Washington Post. Everyone talks about the big political stories it's broken and its kind of role in the nation dating all the way back to Watergate. But it also is the local hometown paper.

2:57Anthony Zurcher:It's a connection to the community. It has sports coverage covering all the major sports teams, like college teams. It has metro coverage, so covering City Hall and covering things that happened in Washington, D.C. It has cultural coverage about the social events and things that are happening that are important to people who actually physically live in Washington. Yeah. So it's partly that, isn't it? The non-coverage of DC. They say they're downsizing the Metro. The sports department going completely, the books going completely. They've laid off 30 % of all their employees, including people on the business side, 300 of roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom.

3:39And then really incredibly, and this got a lot of publicity in the days when it happened, didn't it? Partly brought about because the people themselves complained and said they didn't have the money to get home in some cases. They chucked out a lot of people who were based abroad.

3:56Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, The Post was one of the few news outlets, American news outlets, with a global footprint. Most newspapers had cut back their foreign coverage, relying on AP or Reuters or other news services to cover the world. The Post was different. They had a lot of reporters all over the world. And front page stories time and time again were coming from their reporters, whether it was in Asia or in South America or elsewhere in the Middle East. They were generating a headline, generating front page news, and they're cutting that back as well. And I think the 300 number you mentioned, I mean, that may may underestimate it because there's a 300 union workers at The Washington Post, guild members.

4:42Anthony Zurcher:There may be more freelance people, people who are working on contracts, people who are not covered by the union who have also been been laid off. So I've seen upwards of half of the active journalists at The Post are gone. And this isn't the first cut. They had already been cutting back their staffing over recent years. And just last year, they consolidated the paper, the print paper, the front page section, instead of Metro and sports and style, which is kind of the lifestyle section and business. They had packed that all into one. So really, the paper was greatly reduced even before these latest cuts.

5:18It's worth quoting Lizzie Johnson, the woman who's based in Kiev, for whom this was obviously a complete surprise because she said on X, I was just laid off by the Washington Post in the middle of a war zone. I have no words. I'm devastated. and there are other foreign correspondents who similarly reacted like that and reacted it would seem with surprise. There was a Brit, wasn't there? Because he's gone now but the chief executive, Will Lewis had a history in British papers and has now left but he said there were difficult decisions to ensure the sustainable future of the post. So I suppose the challenge to all of that including that journalist based in Kiev, is it wasn't a successful newspaper.

6:07It just commercially wasn't working. The things that Jeff Bezos said could happen when he took it over, and when he said those words that we recently heard back in 2016, that it hasn't worked. Right.

6:22Anthony Zurcher:It wasn't making money. And the New York Times has found a way to make money through games and through recipes and other add-ons, but the Post was losing money. Now, when you're as rich as Jeff Bezos, it was a rounding error, the amount of money they were losing. But still, it was something that was costing financially. It wasn't self-sustaining. So in some ways, that is a valid point. And it's not a point that's unique to the Washington Post. Newspapers all over this country have had to greatly reduce themselves, cut their staff, cut their footprint because they were not making money and the business model simply wasn't working.

7:05Anthony Zurcher:But there was a feeling that the Washington Post, because of Bezos, because it was the Washington Post, was somehow immune. And you mentioned Will Lewis, who has since resigned. He wasn't even there on the announcement of these cuts. The way that Washington Post staffers learned about them was via email, that if they still had their job or not. And the group announcement did not involve the publisher, who actually the next day was over in California at a Super Bowl red carpet event. So there was a lot of criticism. Bezos hasn't said anything publicly about it either. So not just a tragedy for a lot of Washington Post employees, people who have been working there for decades, but it's also just a tragedy for the paper writ large and for how they handled this layoff.

7:55And it's worth emphasizing, isn't it, the plans that Bezos had and the boasts that he made about how successful it was going to be. So he bought it for$250 million, didn't he? Which, as you say, a rounding error, not a lot of money to pay for it. Half a yacht. In 2013. Yeah, Yeah, half a yacht. He bought it for half a yacht back in 2013. And it's worth listening to what he said in those 2016 comments. So three years after he'd bought it, he was still mighty positive about it. To put it mildly, let's listen in.

8:30Anthony Zurcher:We need to take the Washington Post from being a great local paper, which was a very successful strategy for decades and transform it into a great national and global paper. And we have that capability. We can do that. And as we did that, we're going to change the revenue structure. We've historically made a relatively large amount of money per reader on a relatively small number of readers. And we need instead to make a relatively small amount of money per reader on a much larger number of readers. And that's, you know, the Internet, if you are studying the news business, the Internet has been a disaster for traditional news companies for the most part.

9:17Anthony Zurcher:And it's because it takes a lot of things away. There are a lot of kind of anti-gifts that the Internet brought to the traditional news business. But it does bring one huge gift, and you have to maximize your usage of that new gift, which is that it provides almost free global distribution. And so that's how you can get, we can have hundreds of millions of readers and make very little money and have an amazing institution. And I'm happy to fund that until we get there. And he's not wrong. I mean, he makes some valid points there about the challenges that the news business faces, the opportunities that it presents.

9:54Anthony Zurcher:And during the first four years of the Trump administration, when Bezos already had ownership of the paper, the Washington Post actually did really well. They invested a lot of money in their news coverage. They expanded their newsroom. They moved from an older office building to a new one right on K Street, not too far from here. And you saw in their global subscription numbers, national subscription numbers, a lot of people willing to pay for the content, which included robust coverage of the Trump administration and that slogan which they adopted about democracy dying in darkness. I mean, they had done a decent job of positioning themselves during that first four years of Trump's presidency as exactly what Bezos said there, a national global newspaper that expanded its audience just beyond Washington, D.C.

10:47Anthony Zurcher:and local readers like myself. Yeah. And then things changed, didn't they? Somewhere along the line, and particularly after Donald Trump left power and when he was campaigning to get back, it looks as if Bezos became, in a sense, more interested in Trump than in the paper. Is that a fair way of putting it? I think more attuned to the possibility of Trump coming back. I mean, the news business, and we can see it from our own traffic figures here at the BBC, but globally and here in the US, people kind of lost interest in politics, or at the very least, their attention and their willingness to consume news stories dipped when Donald Trump was defeated in 2020.

11:37Anthony Zurcher:Understandably so. I mean, Joe Biden was a much less dramatic president on a number of different areas. So the challenge for the news business was to try to continue to grow your audience, hold that audience they had while dealing with a shrinking pie. Then it became clear that Trump was going to come back and that Trump had a list of people that he was going to punish his retribution list and was going to be doing, had plans for a much more aggressive presidency his second term. And I think there you touch on it, that Bezos became sensitive to what Trump was planning and adjusted his strategy to be less confrontational, not confrontational the way the post was in the first term, something different.

12:26Anthony Zurcher:And we saw signs of that even before Trump won re-election in 2024 with the decision that was instigated by Bezos to tank a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris by the paper's editorial board, which we talked about at the time as a fairly dramatic about-face that happened almost without any kind of preparation or announcement shortly before Election Day. It's worth listening to Martin Barron on that. So Martin Barron was editor of the paper from 2013 to 2021. So a lot of it under Jeff Bezos. Let's listen to him. That alienated so many of the readers of the post because it was a transparent effort to not to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump at that point, but to not offend Donald Trump at that point.

13:15And hundreds of thousands of subscribers abandoned the post. And his activities subsequent to that alienated, definitely alienated subscribers. The fact that he appeared during the inauguration on the stage with Donald Trump, the fact that Amazon bought for an exorbitant price the documentary of Melania Trump, the fact that it acquired the rights to The Apprentice television series in which Donald Trump starred and that he receives a substantial portion of that money. And then the decision to totally remake the opinion pages in which they essentially excluded all columnists who were to the left of center, even slightly to the left of center, And they remade the editorials as well to sort of push this sort of libertarian ideology that corresponds to Jeff Bezos' own ideology.

14:02But they softened all the criticism of Donald Trump. They constantly were taking a knock at Democrats for often no good reason. That editorial page today really lacks a moral core.

14:14Anthony Zurcher:He ticks through a lot of the criticisms and bullet points that people have presented. If you read the editorial page, the official voice of The Washington Post now, it is decidedly more conservative than it was under under Barron in the in the first four years of Trump's presidency from 2016 to 2020. So a dramatic change among all of these others that we we just heard about. And when you build your subscription model, as they did in the first four years of Trump's presidency, to be a national and global paper that that confronts power and talks about democracy, dying in darkness and shines a light on Donald Trump.

14:57Anthony Zurcher:when all of a sudden you seem to be moving away from that and being more sympathetic towards Trump. But a lot of those people who signed up are going to go away. And that's exactly what happened. You think in the New York Times and the changes that were made at the New York Times to get it commercially onto a good footing, the recipes and all this stuff that you can subscribe to around the world. And I've got family members who give inordinate amounts of money to the New York Times for the various things that you can sort of subscribe to. That business model, again, you'd think Jeff Bezos of all people would be up for that sort of thing, but it didn't come, did it?

15:37And again, Marty Baron, that former editor, I thought was really interesting on that. You know, this has been described as a reset, but it looks more like a retreat because a reset, I would expect them to announce some new innovative initiatives, some new things that they're doing that are imaginative, that are creative, that offer the promise of financial stability and growth. And I didn't hear any of that. All I heard was less. So I'm not sure exactly what the appeal of that is. I'd like to hear some vision. And I didn't hear much of a vision today.

16:08Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, you know, they had advanced some ideas over the past couple of years to invest more in a new kind of newsroom that did events and used AI and focused on different kinds of storytelling, and none of that panned out. So now they cut back, as Marty Baron points out there, and are still expecting people to pay the same amount of money for less of a product, which I think that's been the real challenge. They aren't putting forward some sort of an idea of what the post should be with this new restructuring. See, if I was Jeff Bezos, and I'm not, I would spend a little bit more money on it. I'd turn it into a thing because the classic reason a wealthy person buys a newspaper, and it's usually wealthy men, isn't it?

17:07And you think right back through history. I mean the obvious counterpoint to all of this is Rupert Murdoch isn't it who's still got the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post and and papers in in Britain etc but for a purpose I mean number one obviously cares about newspapers but number two wants to be part of the conversation wants to influence people wants to have that sort of ability to influence affairs that you only get through a newspaper, or you only got through a newspaper in the past. Jeff Bezos buys the paper and then doesn't seem to have any interest in doing the things that traditionally you would do in that circumstance.

17:49That's what I don't understand about him.

17:51Anthony Zurcher:Maybe Bezos realized how exposed Amazon writ large is to Washington and to the presidency and to Trump's particular influences and made the decision that it wasn't worth trying to keep the Washington Post the way it is, the risks were too great. I mean, the numbers that Amazon gets from the federal government, billions of dollars for Amazon web services and other things that they provide the government. I mean, that makes Amazon very vulnerable to a federal government that becomes hostile to Bezos and to Amazon. And we saw that actually in Trump's first term, where they gave this massive defense contract to someone else instead of Amazon.

18:35Anthony Zurcher:And while it wasn't clear that the reason was because Trump doesn't like the Washington Post, a lot of people interpreted it that way. And so the warnings were there. And so it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to say Bezos made that determination when it became clearer and clearer that Trump could win the White House back in 2024 and reoriented his business to acknowledge that. And the Washington Post is what paid the price. Yeah. And just to double down on that. So Amazon Cloud Services, having those big contracts with the US federal government, a lot of money coming to Amazon, but also now the military awarding government contracts to Blue Origin.

19:18Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos's space technology company. And Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, as he now styles himself, went to those facilities in Florida just earlier this month. And it's really worth hearing what Hegseth had to say, because this, in a sense, is probably the answer to my question, which you've also sort of answered, which is why Jeff Bezos changed his mind, if he did change his mind, about the relative importance of the Washington Post vis-a-vis his other business interests. Let's listen to Pete Hegseth.

19:58Anthony Zurcher:We live in a realistic world where American strength has to partner with American manufacturing. And if you don't have both, you don't have a free country. And you have to have world-class manufacturing. Let me tell you this. Take your cameras through this factory. And what I said to Mr. Bezos was this might be some of the most sophisticated manufacturing the world has ever seen that can only be done at scale in the United States of America. No more business as usual, which I know, Mr. Bezos, is music to your ears. You've never done business as usual. And at the War Department, business as usual is over.

20:40And I suppose when you listen to that, Anthony, that there is a big difference, isn't there, between Bezos and Rupert Murdoch. I mean, albeit one of the differences is Bezos is even richer than Rupert Murdoch. But Rupert Murdoch doesn't have those kind of business interests to defend, does he? And Murdoch is just so much more of a traditional media person, albeit he can come under pressure from the Trump administration. Indeed, he is. The Wall Street Journal is being sued, isn't it, by Donald Trump. But at the same time, he doesn't have that wider nexus of stuff that could be really imperiled by Donald Trump.

21:18So that could account, I suppose, for the difference. Why Murdoch is still very much, you think of the Wall Street Journal, really leading the way in a sense, actually, of stories that are embarrassing for Donald Trump. in spite of Rupert Murdoch's occasional closeness to him, and he attends dinners with him and all the rest of it, and he's on the right of politics. But that relationship, that Bezos-Trump relationship just doesn't exist for Murdoch. Right.

21:47Anthony Zurcher:Journalism is risky business. Doing journalism right, I mean, telling the truth to power, holding those in power to account, writing stories and coming up with television segments and investigations that make people in power uncomfortable, that reveal uncomfortable truths that cause people in power to feel threatened because they don't want these stories out. I mean, that is risky. And we've seen it in multiple different media outlets, the BBC, Wall Street Journal, as you mentioned, ABC, CNN, CBS, they've all had to deal with Trump's ire and the organizations that have, as you mentioned, larger corporate interests are the ones that seem to be the most under pressure to change their orientation because of the risks that that presents, as you mentioned, to the larger kind of commercial enterprises.

22:45Anthony Zurcher:Now, Jeff Bezos has come out with a statement about why they made these cuts. And he did say that the Post has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity each and every day. hey, our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus. So he hasn't provided whole details about what he wants for the post, but he has said that they're going to use data to try to choose a direction. The question is, where does that direction take the post? And at least at this point, it's not clear, but it is clear, however, that there are external pressures on Bezos and the Washington Post that are changing this course beyond just the data that they're getting from readers.

23:29Yeah, I mean, I think you just captured it there, haven't you, with that Bezos statement, but also what you were saying as well about the job of journalism, which Murdoch gets. There is just a real difference, isn't there, between the personalities of the people and the approaches is more than personality. The whole approach to life of those two, which it seems to me is really crucial. And of course, you know, there's another question as well, Anthony, which is whether any of this really matters. Who cares about newspapers in 2026? People get their news from elsewhere, from social media, from TV.