Former Washington Post Staffers Slam Billionaire Bezos for Gutting Paper

The Washington Post has laid off more than 300 journalists, dismantling its sports, local news and international coverage. “Everybody is grieving, and it’s a loss for our readers,” says Nilo Tabrizy, one of the paper’s recently laid-off staff, who describes a “robotic” meeting announcing the cuts. “They didn’t have the dignity to look us in the eye.” The shocking staff culling has been widely attributed to the paper’s leadership under Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought the nearly 150-year-old institution in 2013. Karen Attiah, the former global opinion editor at the Post, was hired soon after Bezos’s arrival. She recounts how the arrival of a billionaire backer initially revitalized the paper with resources and creative freedom, before souring over the next decade. “We thought [he] shared the same values that we had,” says Attiah, who was fired from the Post last fall over comments she made about the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “Journalism deserves better than a billionaire owner who decides that partying in Europe is more important than people’s lives.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to stay on the media right now. In what’s been described a “bloodbath,” The Washington Post has laid off more than 300 journalists, about 30% of all its employees, dismantling its sports, local news and international coverage, including all of the newspaper’s Middle East correspondents and editors. The Post’s Ukraine reporter Lizzie Johnson wrote on X, quote, “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a war zone,” she wrote from Ukraine.

On Thursday, fired workers rallied outside The Washington Post office. This is the reporter Ben Brasch, who was fired Tuesday.

BEN BRASCH: These layoffs are shameful!

FIRED WORKERS: Shame!

BEN BRASCH: The fourth-richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post. He can run it at a loss for the rest of time, and yet he refuses! And instead, he’s spending tens of millions of dollars buying a documentary for Melania Trump to curry favor with the president of the United States. When people show you who they are, believe them. Billionaires only get rich by stealing from us.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013. [In 2024], the paper lost over 250,000 digital subscribers after the paper announced it would not make an endorsement in the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Bezos’s Amazon later donated a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund.

We’re joined right now by two guests. Karen Attiah, former global opinion editor for The Washington Post, was fired last year over social media posts made after the killing of far-right activist Charlie Kirk. Nilo Tabrizy is an investigative reporter who closely covers Iran. She was just laid off from The Washington Post yesterday.

Nilo, let’s start with you, what’s being termed a “bloodbath,” 300 employees of The Washington Post, a third of The Washington Post. You write about Iran. Talk about what happened in Iran. Talk about what happened with the Middle East coverage, overall, and what’s happened with all of your colleagues.

NILO TABRIZY: Yeah. Thank you. I’m glad to be here to discuss what happened at the Post.

So, our entire Middle East staff was laid off. Most of the international desk was dismantled, as well. And this is something that we heard was coming down in the newsroom a few weeks ago. And we also heard that when this plan was presented to Peter Finn, who is the head of the international desk and mentor to many at the Post, he said to them he would rather be laid off than deal with this horrible gutting and reconstruction, as it was, you know, phrased.

So, it’s been incredibly depressing. Everybody is grieving. And it’s a loss for our readers. It’s a loss for everyone. And the way the company is framing, you know, that we want to focus more on national security, well, international reporters and national security, I mean, these two desks collaborate so much with each other. And so, it’s a deeply grim moment.

And, you know, as a member of the Post Guild, in the union at The Washington Post, we’re lucky to have the guild fight for us, but international staff, they’re not members of the guild. And even worse, there are so many local workers that we work with at the Post. We have local drivers, translators, reporters that collaborate with our bureau chiefs and with our correspondents. Those people are not protected in the same way that I am. And so, it’s incredibly awful. There’s no words to describe the dismantling that’s happening at the Post.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nilo, I wanted to ask you, especially this whole issue of the international reporting, with so few U.S. media companies still having even a skeleton staff of reporters reporting on affairs outside the United States: What does that turn The Washington Post into? And also, what does that say about the ability of the media in the U.S. to let people know in this country what’s going on in the rest of the world?

NILO TABRIZY: Right. I mean, it’s a complete disservice. I mean, we do this job because we want to be in service to the public. This is the main intention for so many of us. And taking the ability away to do this type of reporting to communicate what’s important, I mean, it’s a disservice to our readership and to anyone who wants to engage in these issues. I mean, my last story that I did for the Post, which published on Monday, the day before I got laid off, was about the buildup that we’re seeing of vessels, of U.S. military equipment in the Persian Gulf, and potentially there might be some type of strike. And now the Post is not well placed to cover that. And it’s incredibly heartbreaking.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring Karen Attiah into the conversation, as well. Karen, your response to these layoffs? And Jeff Bezos was — while they were happening, was actually in Paris at a Haute Couture Week?

KAREN ATTIAH: Yeah, I mean, I joined the Post, and specifically the opinion section, right after Bezos bought the paper, so in about 2014. And I was, you know, there when we were kind of riding high, basically. We had not only Bezos cash — right? — but we had the permission, in a lot of ways, to be able to be creative, in order to be able to be swashbuckling, provocative. And for most of my time, a good chunk of my time in the opinion section, I was the global opinions editor, and we had a direct mandate, basically, from Bezos, saying that he wanted The Washington Post to be a global newspaper, that he wanted us to be the English-speaking newspaper that the rest of the world turned to. So, that’s why, you know, I got to work recruiting writers and building up that section of global writers, including Jamal Khashoggi, who was very brutally murdered in 2018. Jeff Bezos, we thought, shared the same values that we had, particularly when it came to international coverage and for standing up for journalists who weren’t able to speak freely in their areas of the world.

And now to see him butchering the Post, or at least, at the very least, partying in Paris and in Europe while so many of my colleagues are being unceremoniously kicked out of their job, at a time when America desperately needs to know what’s going on in its own neighborhood and in the world, it’s just — it’s unconscionable, frankly.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Karen Attiah, you were the former global opinion editor for The Washington Post. You platformed many courageous voices, including Jamal Khashoggi, who would be murdered in the embassy in Turkey. And all the intelligence reports from the agencies of the United States government pointed the finger at a dear ally of President Trump, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Your thoughts on your ousting? Yeah, it was the time of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but what you represented at the Post?

KAREN ATTIAH: You know, so much about this is — breaks my heart still to this day. What breaks my heart is, yes, having the ability to give writers a home in times where they couldn’t, and now when they ask, “Well, where can we be heard? Where can our voices go?” and I can’t, in good conscience, say that they have a safe place in The Washington Post anymore.

You know, I think, for me, you know, I was illegally, I will say, fired for posting very — you know, posting the facts about gun violence in this country, about race in this country, and basically, you know, fired for doing my job. But the signs were all there, the censoring of the opinion page. When Bezos said that opinions that were outside of his scope of free markets and personal liberties, that was a red flashing sign that censorship and purging was going to come for The Washington Post. I tried to hold on for as long as I could and do the work that I was, you know, paid to do for as long as I could, until I couldn’t. I mean, I’m still continuing to fight that termination, as well. So, I think, if anything, showing that we need to stand up to this purging is even more important. So, I’m definitely fighting back, with the assistance — and not just the assistance, but the guild has my back, so I’m grateful for that.

But this is a bigger moment. There’s a reason why this is an international news story. I think The Washington Post stands for a lot more than just a media company. It stands for a lot more than even just journalism, I would say. For a lot of people around the world, they’re looking at The Washington Post as a proxy and a bellwether for what’s happening to America and democracy, right?

And when we are not able to even be able to freely cover our own neighborhoods, be able to freely cover the world, be able to, you know, under — D.C. being under military occupation, basically, with the National Guard, we can’t even retain a diverse set of journalists in a city that is very much immigrants, people of color. There are probably, at this point, less than maybe 30 Black journalists left. I was the last Black columnist left at The Washington Post, full-time staff opinions columnist left at The Washington Post. So, the brazenness with which the destruction of the line of defense of journalism against oppression is just — it’s as shameless on their end as it is cruel. And D.C. deserves better. This entire region deserves better. Journalism deserves better than a billionaire owner who decides that, you know, partying in Europe is more important than people’s lives. The Washington Post deserves a better owner than this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask Nilo Tabrizy about this, this enormous change in direction that Bezos has gone in with The Washington Post versus how he started, then his muzzling of the editorial page and then his fawning after Trump with the financing of the Melania film. What is your sense of the enormity of this change? It’s almost like a 180-degree turn on his part from where he started.

NILO TABRIZY: Absolutely. I mean, I can’t say it better myself. It’s a complete departure from the mission of the Post and “Democracy dies in darkness.” Well, now it’s completely dark. And what do we have left?

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the motto of The Washington Post, adopted in 2017.

NILO TABRIZY: Yes, that’s the motto of The Washington Post, exactly. And it’s really — yeah, it’s indescribable. And I really feel for my Post colleagues who now have to show up and work in a carcass of what this incredible institution was. The Post was such a special culture. It was different from any other newsroom I’ve worked in, where it’s deeply collaborative. Desks were not competing for each other. Everyone was there for the same mission, which was to put out the best report. And they’ve completely dismantled that. And again, it’s a deep disservice to any of our readers, to our public.

And it shows the fragility of these institutions and how important it is to protect them, because with one fell swoop, in a horrific layoff, you know, 30-minute robotic meeting, in which our publisher was not even present — we saw that our publisher, Will Lewis, was at some Super Bowl-related event — they didn’t have the dignity to look us in the eye. You know, people got these mass emails: “Your job is eliminated.”

AMY GOODMAN: And you were told not to come to work yesterday.

NILO TABRIZY: We were all told not to come to work. We had an 8:30 a.m. Zoom, which, in itself, is unconscionable. And then, after that, employees who even had, you know, 27-plus years of service were told they lost their job in a one-line email, where our publisher, again, was not present. This, again, really shows the lack of leadership at the Post.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to continue to cover this story and continue to cover the corporate media and remind people Democracy Now! is independent. Nilo Tabrizy, just laid off from The Washington Post, will stay with us as we talk about Iran next. And Karen Attiah, we thank you so much for joining us, former global opinion editor for The Washington Post.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the talks in Oman around Iran, between the United States and Iran, and then we’ll talk about Gaza. Stay with us.