It's hard to separate the general malaise of the newspaper industry from the objective damage that Bezos has done to the Post's reputation.
A ton of people canceled their subscriptions right after Bezos refused to have an endorsement. Local message boards filled up with employees claiming that the actual news reporting was still being done well and not to cancel just because the op-eds were now explicitly partisan. They're probably right, but the op-ed pages represent the accumulated wisdom of journalists spending decades in the career, and having that wiped out lost a lot of the paper's value to the people who used to read it daily.
I would also say many of the settlements from news organizations are them sucking up to Trump. They chose to pay in private agreements instead of fighting frivolous lawsuits that would easily have been won. That’s a way of paying the bribe while claiming you’re just setting a lawsuit.
I don’t find the New York Times to be of much use either — their view from nowhere approach serves to normalize extremism and they’ve been happy to platform attacks on vulnerable minorities as well.
They attempt to report as though they don't have a point of view on the issue in pursuit of objectivity, which leaves them to position themselves in the middle of two perspectives which may or may not be extreme but, by doing so, they make both position seem reasonable.
They can't or won't call out racism and extreme action by the Trump administration because they'd forfeit their right to that faux objectivity. Perhaps they'll report the facts, but their unwillingness to call something what it is makes that thing appear to be acceptable.
(1) Excessive stridency about "racism" is a magic spell that makes blacks vote Republican. I mean, a lot of Black people there is a lot more to being Black than being the descendant of slaves and they are personally offended by the further fringes of "systematic racism" talk
(2) Many people are not excited about threats to "Democracy" because they see it is for "them", see
why care about norm violations if those norms are unjust and lead to what looks like bad outcomes (and certainly capital-D Democrats seem to care less about outcomes than about following broken processes and never annoying donors)
(3) I was really burned out by talk of "fascism" ten years ago. Like yeah, Donald Trump is definitely flirting with it today but after years of left-wing "anti-fascists" who hate fascism but love the footwear, who will other with with the worst of them and seem to be jealous, who call Keir Starmer a fascist, who call your local police chief a fascist, I think it is a magic spell to bring fascism into the world but if you have a dialectical theory in which you get meaning out of saying you fight fascism maybe that's what you secretly want.
It's hard to separate the general malaise of the newspaper industry from the objective damage that Bezos has done to the Post's reputation.
A ton of people canceled their subscriptions right after Bezos refused to have an endorsement. Local message boards filled up with employees claiming that the actual news reporting was still being done well and not to cancel just because the op-eds were now explicitly partisan. They're probably right, but the op-ed pages represent the accumulated wisdom of journalists spending decades in the career, and having that wiped out lost a lot of the paper's value to the people who used to read it daily.
https://archive.today/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/bus...
https://archive.ph/NKJnY
(A comment I saw: "You have to understand, Bezos is down to his last $250 billion.")
Related:
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890034
We need more independent journalism, not a billionaire's hobby that they use to push their own viewpoints. It's been worthless since Bezos bought it.
It's more nuanced than that. Under Trump I, Bezos added the batman-like slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness". Under Trump II, Bezos sucks up to Trump.
I would also say many of the settlements from news organizations are them sucking up to Trump. They chose to pay in private agreements instead of fighting frivolous lawsuits that would easily have been won. That’s a way of paying the bribe while claiming you’re just setting a lawsuit.
I'll add this is a good article about the decline of the WaPo:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-sad-and-self-inflicted-decl...
Notably in Trump I the WaPo catches up to The New York Times in influence and in Trump II it falls off.
I don’t find the New York Times to be of much use either — their view from nowhere approach serves to normalize extremism and they’ve been happy to platform attacks on vulnerable minorities as well.
Can you explain more? What’s the “view from nowhere” approach?
They attempt to report as though they don't have a point of view on the issue in pursuit of objectivity, which leaves them to position themselves in the middle of two perspectives which may or may not be extreme but, by doing so, they make both position seem reasonable.
They can't or won't call out racism and extreme action by the Trump administration because they'd forfeit their right to that faux objectivity. Perhaps they'll report the facts, but their unwillingness to call something what it is makes that thing appear to be acceptable.
(1) Excessive stridency about "racism" is a magic spell that makes blacks vote Republican. I mean, a lot of Black people there is a lot more to being Black than being the descendant of slaves and they are personally offended by the further fringes of "systematic racism" talk
(2) Many people are not excited about threats to "Democracy" because they see it is for "them", see
https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
why care about norm violations if those norms are unjust and lead to what looks like bad outcomes (and certainly capital-D Democrats seem to care less about outcomes than about following broken processes and never annoying donors)
(3) I was really burned out by talk of "fascism" ten years ago. Like yeah, Donald Trump is definitely flirting with it today but after years of left-wing "anti-fascists" who hate fascism but love the footwear, who will other with with the worst of them and seem to be jealous, who call Keir Starmer a fascist, who call your local police chief a fascist, I think it is a magic spell to bring fascism into the world but if you have a dialectical theory in which you get meaning out of saying you fight fascism maybe that's what you secretly want.
[dead]
The fork happened when one acquired Wordle and expanded its daily games, and the other didn't.