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  "path": "/post/206237/liberals-save-washington-post-jeff-bezos-layoffs",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-06T15:30:45.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Politics",
    "Fighting Words",
    "Media",
    "The Washington Post",
    "Jeff Bezos",
    "this one",
    "300 layoffs he ordered Wednesday",
    "net worth would drop",
    "was spotted at a glam Super Bowl–related event",
    "this embarrassing piece of Melania agitprop",
    "wrote a friend",
    "_Sign up here_"
  ],
  "textContent": "By far the most widely read piece I’ve written in my time at _The New Republic_ is this one, which I wrote right after the 2024 election and headlined “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” My answer to that question was the media—specifically, that an avowedly right-wing media, which existed not to report the news but to elect Republicans and turn liberalism into a grotesque and indefensible caricature of itself, had grown and grown since the 1990s, finally by 2024 reaching the point where it was more powerful and more agenda-setting than the mainstream media.\n\nI wrote: “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not _The New York Times_. Not _The Washington Post_ (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.… Even the mighty _New York Times_ follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”\n\nHere we sit, 15 months later, and 13 months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, and what’s changed? What’s changed, predictably, is that the landscape is even bleaker. CBS News, now run by Bari Weiss, has become part of that agenda-setting right-wing media—which includes Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, and more. And so has _The Washington Post,_ whose rightward turn on its editorial page started becoming apparent late last year.\n\nAnd this week, Bezos moved to assert his personal control not just over the opinion pages. Now he’s decided to start dismantling the news side, with the 300 layoffs he ordered Wednesday. As you’ve no doubt read by now, the _Post_ has suffered admittedly massive losses lately—$100 million in 2024. But as you’ve also surely read, Bezos could cover those losses if he wanted to with what he makes in a few days. If he wrote a check tomorrow to cover those losses, his net worth would drop, as Truthout’s Sharon Zhang observed, from the current _Forbes_ -estimated $248.7 billion—all the way down to a worrying $248.6 billion.\n\nSo why did he decide not to write that check? I don’t know the man, and of course on some level, rich men hate writing such checks. But if he actually believed in the value of journalism’s role in sustaining democracy, as he appeared to for the first few years after he bought the paper in 2013, he’d have written it happily.\n\nSo the question arises: What are we to conclude from his refusal to do so? There’s only one conclusion. He doesn’t care about democracy. He sees no vital role for a vigorous free press in sustaining it. And he wants _The Washington Post_ not only to be a right-leaning libertarian newspaper, which, as many have observed, is his right. He wants it to be a lousy newspaper. A weak simulacrum of what it was once and should be. A newspaper that cannot play its time-honored role as a check on abuses of power.\n\nI note here, as others have, that the _Post_ still has 500 journalists, which is a lot, and that the layoffs largely didn’t touch the national reporting teams. That’s all good, I guess. But just wait. The guillotine will start finding those necks eventually. Why? Because these layoffs won’t staunch losses over the long haul. Indeed, they may make them worse. More subscribers who decided to give the paper one more chance after Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement will jump ship (in my anecdotal experience, that’s happening to a considerable degree already). Losses will continue. And one day, the _Post_ ’s publisher—this horror-show hack named Will Lewis, this meretricious mountebank who was too cowardly to join the staff call announcing the layoffs but who was spotted at a glam Super Bowl–related event in San Francisco the very next day—will announce that more belt-tightening is required.\n\nAnd I submit to you that Bezos at best doesn’t care and, at worst, actually _wants_ this on some level. Once upon a dear old time, he seemed to want a real newspaper. But after he threw in his lot with Trump (or Trumps, plural, given his financing of this embarrassing piece of Melania agitprop), that changed. It’s axiomatic: It is impossible to believe simultaneously in a vigorous press and in the success of Donald Trump. The latter, which is based on the smashing of democratic laws and customs, cannot succeed if the former exists. And, on an emotional and psychic and most certainly pecuniary level, Bezos has made his choice.\n\nRich liberals, I beg of you: Do something. Step in to save _The Washington Post_. Maybe there’s not a single one of you who has the money to swallow $100 million in annual losses. But maybe five or six of you together do. And by the way: If you do it right, and you hire the right editors and rehire some of the old columnists and do some intelligent modernizing around video and podcasts and are willing to be an unapologetically liberal newspaper, you’ll find an audience again.\n\nYou’ll be doing a lot more than saving some jobs. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” Thomas Jefferson wrote a friend in 1786. A news outlet isn’t a shoe store. It’s a guardrail against tyranny. It shouldn’t surprise us that a man worth a quarter-trillion dollars, whose wealth has increased _tenfold_ in the last decade, doesn’t care about this. Democracy, tyranny … makes no difference to him. In fact, to the extent that democracy makes room for his employees to try to join unions and so forth, democracy is an inconvenience. So is a free press.\n\nSo take it off his hands. Make Bezos the proverbial offer he can’t refuse. He may actually refuse to sell to a liberal consortium—his preference for tyranny may now be that stark. But it can’t hurt to try. Your accountants might grouse, but there is no question that history will reward you.\n\n_This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky.__Sign up here_ _._\n\n\n",
  "title": "Rich Liberals: Please, Please Step Up and Save The Washington Post"
}