Will Jeff Bezos Stick with Will Lewis Amid WaPo's Credibility Crisis?

The Washington Post is at risk of losing the public's trust.

Hi all, Parker here.

Today’s newsletter is a bit of a follow-up to last week’s post about changes happening at The Washington Post. If you haven’t had a chance to check that one out, you may want to give it a read first:

3 Smart Takes on the Shake-up at the Washington Post and What the Mini British Media Takeover Might Mean

In the days since, all hell seems to have broken loose at the Post, with a scandal involving publisher and CEO Will Lewis and unethical attempts to influence coverage. I figured I’d provide a bit of a recap and share some of my thoughts on the topic in today’s newsletter edition.

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(Photo of Will Lewis via Elliott O'Donovan for The Washington Post)

NPR’s David Folkenflik reported that Lewis had offered an exclusive interview in exchange for Folkenflik killing an unflattering story involving Lewis last December. From NPR:

“'Washington Post' CEO tried to kill a story about himself. It wasn’t the first time” (NPR, David Folkenflik, 6/6/24)

In December, I wrote the first comprehensive piece based on new documents cited in a London courtroom alleging that Lewis had helped cover up a scandal involving widespread criminal practices at media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids. (Lewis has previously denied the allegations.)

At that time, Lewis had just been named publisher and CEO by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, but had not yet started. In several conversations, Lewis repeatedly — and heatedly —offered to give me an exclusive interview about the Post’s future, as long as I dropped the story about the allegations.

As other journalists noted, this seemed to be an unethical habit of Lewis’s, referring to a previous attempt to quash a story at the Post on the topic earlier this year. As the New York Times reported:

“Washington Post C.E.O. Promised Interview for Ignoring Scandal, NPR Reporter Says” (The New York Times, Katie Robertson, Benjamin Mullin, 6/6/24)

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Mr. Lewis clashed with Ms. Buzbee over the newspaper’s coverage of the phone-hacking scandal in the weeks leading up to her departure.

Ms. Buzbee informed Mr. Lewis in mid-May that the newsroom planned to cover the coming ruling from the judge. Mr. Lewis told Ms. Buzbee the case involving him did not merit coverage, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.

When Ms. Buzbee said The Post would publish an article anyway, he said her decision represented a lapse in judgment. The interaction rattled Ms. Buzbee, but the article was published and Mr. Lewis did not interfere with its publication.

Okay, so he didn’t interfere with its publication¹; he just replaced her weeks later. Okay, then.

But what I find most bizarre about all of this is how Lewis responded to getting caught twice trying to bury unflattering-yet-legitimately-newsworthy stories about himself. Instead of acknowledging that it’s inappropriate to try to kill stories with bribes (Folkenflik) or corporate pressure (Buzbee), Lewis lashed out at Folkenflik, who is well-respected within the D.C. political journalism community, calling him “an activist, not a journalist.”

“Post publisher draws more scrutiny after newsroom shake-up” (The Washington Post, Sarah Ellison, Elahe Izadi, 6/6/24)

In his email to The Post, Lewis called Folkenflik — who published a book in 2013 on Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — “an activist, not a journalist.” Lewis added: “I had an off the record conversation with him before I joined you at The Post and some six months later he has dusted it down, and made up some excuse to make a story of a non-story.”

Within the company, things aren’t looking great. “Morale has fallen off a cliff,” wrote CNN’s Oliver Darcy on Thursday:

“Morale plummets inside The Washington Post as staffers express alarm over publisher’s attempts to squash story” (CNN, Oliver Darcy, 6/6/24)

“He’s really losing the newsroom on a large scale,” a staffer said, sizing up the state of affairs. “People don’t trust him, don’t believe he has the same values and ethics as our journalists and there are major concerns of how far he would go to censor or shut down coverage.”

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Will Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Post, stick by his man in the face of this ethical and public relations crisis?

Writing for Politico, Jack Shafer asks that very question: “Will Post owner Jeff Bezos want to keep a publisher who is beset with a fast-growing credibility crisis?” That’s the only question that really matters here. Bezos is the only one who can hit pause on Lewis’s full-on transformation of the paper, something he would presumably rather not do.

(Jeff Bezos Photo by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images)

“The Growing Debacle for Will Lewis and the Washington Post” (Politico, Jack Shafer, 6/7/24)

If Lewis hopes to reorder the Washington Post into three newsrooms, and restore the stumbling paper to its former glory, he’ll need every hand on deck. He can’t afford to be drawn into anymore “he said/she said” debates about his recent events, nor can he continue to kick the phone-hacking scandal down the road. If he hopes to succeed, he must perform a reverse ferret of a sort and level with his reporters and the press. Nobody wants to work for an untrustworthy publisher.

Dan Froomkin at Press Watch calls on Lewis to step down:

“Will Lewis must go. The Washington Post publisher’s actions cast doubt on his newsroom’s credibility.” (Press Watch, Dan Froomkin, 6/6/24)

Washington Post publisher Will Lewis pressured former top editor Sally Buzbee not to run a story about his involvement in a decade-old British phone-hacking scandal, and forced her out after she defied him.

Doing what he did violates a core doctrine of American journalism: that editors and publishers are not supposed to interfere with their own newsrooms’ coverage of issues in which they have a personal conflict of interest.

It’s really about as basic as it gets.

And writing for SFGate, Drew Magary has a smart piece about what happens when people with bad ethics get handed power:

“The Washington Post is about to embrace the darkness” (SFGate, Drew Magary, 6/6/24)

This is what happens when journalism and profit end up going head-to-head. It happened before, and now it will happen again. The lights in the Post newsroom are flickering. One day soon, they could go out entirely.

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My take…

At the Daily Beast, former Post media reporter Paul Farhi has a good piece about the “considerable damage” Lewis has done to the Post’s credibility as a news organization in just the past week. There’s one part, in particular, that I’d like to highlight because it really illustrates the arrogance on Lewis’s part that bothers me so much about this story:

“Three Strikes So Why Is WaPo CEO Will Lewis Not Out?” (The Daily Beast, Paul Farhi, 6/7/24)

Lewis has denied meddling with the Post’s editorial decisions and emphasized to staffers that he understands the distinction between publisher and editor. “I know how this works, I know the right thing to do, and what not to do. I know where the lines are, and I respect them,” he wrote in an email to his reporters: “The Executive Editor is free to publish when, how, and what they want to. I am fully signed up to that.”

I’m sure Lewis thinks he’s being a very clever man when he phrases things like, “The Executive Editor is free to publish when, how, and what they want to. I am fully signed up to that,” immediately after pushing out the Executive Editor who dared to question him and replacing her with a friend and loyalist, but anyone paying attention to this can see what he’s doing. Message sent. Message received.

I’ve previously referenced Noam Chomsky’s 1996 interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr about how the press can operate as a “censoring organization,” but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a real-life example of it happening clearly as what Lewis is doing with the Post right now. He’s filtering out people who challenge him, replacing them with toadies who know better. This is not how journalism, of all industries, is supposed to work.

David Zaslav and the Separation of Church and State

Lewis should step down or be removed by Bezos.

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Additional reading…

• “WaPo’s Next Editor, an Undercover Reporter and Stolen Secrets” (The Daily Beast, Corbin Bolies, 6/8/24)

• “Has Jeff Bezos grown tired of free journalism?” (Prospect, Peter Wolodarski, 6/8/24)

• “The Baffling Disaster Unfolding at the Washington Post” (Slate, Justin Peters, 6/8/24)

• “Anger mounts at Washington Post over leadership changes and CEO’s record” (The Guardian, Alexandra Topping, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, 6/7/24)

• “How Washington Post’s Shady New CEO Keeps Breaking Journalism Ethics” (The New Republic, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, 6/7/24)

• “More chaos at The Washington Post as the publisher’s ethics are questioned” (Poynter, Tom Jones, 6/7/24)

• “Inside the culture clash upending the Washington Post” (Politico, Ryan Lizza, 6/7/24)

1. He did, however, instruct editors not to promote the story, per Semafor’s reporting in May.