Jeff Bezos Gutted the Newsroom. He Kept the Megaphone.
Bezos didn’t abandon the Washington Post. He just decided which part of it he wanted.
On Wednesday morning, Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray got on a Zoom call at 8:30 a.m. and told roughly a third of the newsroom they no longer had jobs. The sports section, gone. The books desk, gone. The entire Middle East reporting team, including the Cairo bureau chief, gone. The Asia editor, the bureau chiefs in New Delhi and Sydney, correspondents covering China, Iran, Turkey, gone. The metro desk, which once had 40 reporters covering the city the paper is literally named after, was slashed to 12. The daily “Post Reports” podcast was killed. All of the paper’s photojournalists were reportedly cut.
And Caroline O’Donovan, the reporter who covered Amazon for the Washington Post, was laid off from the Washington Post, which is owned by the founder of Amazon. If you wrote that in a novel, your editor would tell you it was too on the nose.
Neither Jeff Bezos nor publisher Will Lewis were on the call. Bezos said nothing publicly. Lewis was nowhere to be found.
More than 300 people lost their jobs. National health reporter Sabrina Malhi said she found out she’d been laid off while feeding her newborn. International editor Peter Finn reportedly asked to be laid off himself rather than stay and oversee the gutting of his own section. Former Post columnist Sally Jenkins tweeted about the “incredible incompetence and pusillanimity” of Lewis and Murray. Books critic Ron Charles started a Substack, calling the whole thing an “impoverishing, family-wrecking, confidence-crushing ordeal.” Former executive editor Marty Baron called it “among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
Here’s what I keep coming back to: the opinion section doesn’t seem to have been touched. The part of the paper Bezos spent the last two years overhauling, the one he remade in his own ideological image? That part is doing fine.
The story being told this week, by Murray, by Lewis (when he bothers to show up), by the usual chorus of media reporters who frame these things as tragic but inevitable, is that Bezos is letting the Post die. That the money ran out, the business model broke, the AI ate the search traffic, and there was nothing anyone could do.
But that’s not what happened. Bezos didn’t let the Post die. He chose which part lives. He spent the last two years remaking the opinion section into his ideological megaphone while letting the newsroom bleed out. And this week he finished the job. The part of the paper that covers wars and investigates corruption and holds the government (and Amazon) accountable? That’s the part he decided he could live without.
The megaphone stays. The newsroom goes. And if you think that’s a coincidence, I’ve got a $500 million yacht to sell you.
The megaphone
If you only looked at the layoffs, you’d think Jeff Bezos lost interest in the Washington Post. But the timeline tells a completely different story. Over the last two years, Bezos has been more involved with the Post than at any point since he bought the paper in 2013. He just wasn’t involved with the journalism.
It started in early 2024, when Bezos brought in Will Lewis as publisher and CEO. Lewis came straight from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp with phone-hacking scandal baggage and no discernible plan for the Post’s future. But he had one quality Bezos apparently valued above all others: he’d do what he was told. Within weeks, respected executive editor Sally Buzbee was pushed out. Lewis clashed with her over the newsroom’s coverage of his own legal entanglements, and she was gone.
Then came October 2024, when Bezos killed the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. The board had already drafted it. The paper had endorsed a Democrat in every presidential race since 1976. Bezos overruled them. More than 250,000 subscribers canceled in the immediate aftermath. Three members of the editorial board stepped down. Editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned. Columnist Michele Norris resigned. Baron called it “disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
In February 2025, Bezos posted a note to the Post’s staff announcing that the opinion section would now focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets.” Not as one perspective among many. As the only perspective. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars,” he wrote, “will be left to be published by others.” He told opinion editor David Shipley that if Shipley’s answer to leading this new chapter wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” Shipley chose no.
Will Lewis sent a follow-up memo to staff that made the terms even more explicit. The replacement for Shipley, Lewis wrote, would be “someone who is wholehearted in their support for free markets and personal liberties.” Not someone who’d present a range of views. Not someone with editorial independence. Someone wholehearted. The CEO of a major American newspaper told his staff, in writing, that the next opinion editor would be selected based on ideological loyalty to the owner’s mandate.
The new editor, a conservative, Adam O’Neal, was brought in over the summer. And the opinion section started doing exactly what you’d expect a billionaire’s editorial page to do. In October 2025, NPR’s David Folkenflik reported that on at least three occasions in two weeks, the Post published editorials on matters where Bezos had a direct financial interest, without disclosing those interests to readers. One editorial pushed for nuclear power. Bezos has a stake in a Canadian venture pursuing fusion technology. Another argued that Washington, D.C. should speed up approval of self-driving cars, calling safety concerns a “phony excuse.” Amazon’s autonomous car company Zoox had just announced D.C. as its next market. A third editorial opposed inheritance taxes. Jeff Bezos is worth roughly $250 billion.
Ruth Marcus, the Post’s former deputy editorial page editor, told NPR: “I think telling your readers that there might be a conflict in whatever they’re reading is always important. It’s a lot more important when it involves whoever the owner is.”
Marcus would know. She’d already been pushed out by then. In March 2025, after four decades at the Post, she wrote a column criticizing Bezos’s new editorial mandate. Lewis killed it. He wouldn’t even meet with her to discuss it. In her resignation letter, Marcus wrote that the new directive “threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable.”
She wasn’t the only one forced out. In January 2025, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned after the Post refused to publish a cartoon depicting billionaire media owners (including Bezos) courting Donald Trump. She called the decision “dangerous for a free press.” And by October 2025, Post opinion columnist Marc Thiessen was openly stating what everyone already knew: the opinion section was now conservative.
In two years, Bezos handpicked a publisher from Murdoch’s empire, pushed out the executive editor, killed an endorsement, wrote a new ideological mandate for the opinion pages, decided the terms under which the opinion editor would be replaced, watched as Lewis killed a dissenting column and let a cartoonist walk, and presided over an opinion section that started publishing editorials serving his financial interests without telling readers about the conflicts. This was the most engaged Bezos has been with the Post since he bought it. He just had no interest in the part that does journalism.
The newsroom
While Bezos was rewriting the opinion section’s mission statement and enforcing ideological compliance, here’s what was happening on the journalism side of the Washington Post: nothing good, and none of it on purpose.
Lewis, the man Bezos handpicked to run the paper, arrived without a strategy and never found one. What he had instead was a series of initiatives that sounded impressive in press releases and went nowhere. There was WP Ventures. There was a “third newsroom” focused on “creator-driven experimentation.” There was WP Incubator, described as an “initiative for building cutting-edge AI products and new media business models.” Lewis, as CJR put it, “started all these initiatives and then abandoned them almost immediately.”
And then there was the Big Hairy Audacious Goal. That’s what Post leadership actually called it. The target: 200 million paying users. At the time of the announcement, the Post had fewer than three million digital subscribers. The New York Times, the undisputed industry leader, had about 11 million. The Post, the Times, Axios, and Politico combined don’t reach 100 million monthly viewers, and that includes people who aren’t paying. Two hundred million was delusional.
The real numbers were going in the opposite direction. Traffic fell from 1.36 billion unique visits in 2023 to 1.23 billion in 2024 to 1.15 billion in 2025. The subscribers who fled after the endorsement debacle never came back. The Post had been bleeding staff for years before this week’s massacre. Buyouts in late 2023 took out 240 people. Arc XP, the Post’s technology division, cut 54 jobs in 2024. A 4% staff cut came in January 2025. The Washington Post Guild said 400 people had left the paper in the three years before Wednesday’s layoffs.
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