Hundreds of employees at The Washington Post have signed a letter to billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, calling on him to meet with the newspaper’s leaders to discuss the future of the publication amid a series of missteps that have led to reader distrust, workers leaving the company and loss of revenue.
The letter, which includes sentiments flattering to Bezos, comes as the billionaire has been cozying up to the incoming Trump administration in recent weeks — and after his decision, late in the 2024 presidential race, to block opinion editors at The Post from issuing an election endorsement, which would have gone to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
“We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave, with more departures imminent,” the letter stated.
“We urge you to come to our office and meet with Post leaders, as you have in the past, about what has been happening at The Post,” the letter added. “We understand the need for change, and we are eager to deliver the news in innovative ways. But we need a clear vision we can believe in.”
The letter-writers, numbering over 400 in total, reminded Bezos that when he first became the paper’s owner in 2012, he wrote that the “values of The Post do not need changing.”
“We urge you to stand with us in reaffirming those values,” The Post’s employees said.
The letter-writers also signaled that their concerns were unrelated to Bezos’s decision to end the editorial board’s years-long tradition of issuing presidential endorsements, calling the move “the owner’s prerogative.”
As a result of that decision, hundreds of thousands of people canceled their subscriptions to The Post, lessening what had been modest gains in revenue over the year by tens of millions of dollars. A large swath of writers and editors for the publication also resigned in protest.
This is indeed a tumultuous time for the publication. The letter comes just days after The Post laid off around 100 employees in its business division. It also comes after the chief executive of The Post, Will Lewis, a former publisher of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal and conservative United Kingdom-based The Telegraph, sought to shake up the newsroom last summer by attempting to hire his colleague Robert Winnett as senior editor.
Winnett withdrew from that role after staff fromThe Post expressed deep dissatisfaction with his selection — in part due to a controversy surrounding Winnett and Lewis’s time working in the U.K. together, when they used stolen phone data and company records in reporting, violating journalistic ethical norms.
The letter also follows the paper’s decision to censor a longtime cartoonist’s criticism of Bezos for his large donation to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund.
The letter may also signal to Bezos that his staff are upset with the ideological direction the paper is taking. NPR, which was first to report on the letter, noted that Lewis became CEO and publisher of The Post about one year ago, with sources saying that Lewis’s conservative bona fides appealed to Bezos.
The letter itself never cites Lewis, but it’s clear that the complaints about the direction the paper is taking are referring to his leadership and management style.
Bezos’s actions have been — and still are — helpful to Trump, whom the paper has criticized at several points over the past year for his authoritarian rhetoric and bigoted attacks on various groups, particularly immigrants and LGBTQ people.
The billionaire’s decision to nix the editorial board’s endorsement of Harris was received positively by Trump, who used the move to suggest his opponent wasn’t the better candidate. Bezos had argued that the choice was made to give the paper more credibility, but critics at the time noted that it would have the opposite effect.
“Does Jeff Bezos honestly think people will buy the line that he killed his editorial board’s endorsement of Harris because he suddenly became gravely concerned about newspapers’ credibility and decided that not publishing an op-ed will right the ship?” former Los Angeles Times tech reporter Brian Merchant wrote.
Bezos’s credibility on that matter and other decisions at the paper has been further eroded by how comfortable he’s been getting with Trump, especially as the president-elect gets closer to reentering the White House. Bezos is among the three richest men in the world, and all three will be attending Trump’s inauguration next week — a troubling sign that the government’s shift toward overt oligarchy is accelerating.
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