Morale at the Washington Post Has “Never Been Lower”

How the paper that brought down Richard Nixon is struggling to survive the second term of Donald Trump. Plus:

Clare Malone
Malone covers media business, journalism, and politics.

I became a Washington Post reader twenty years ago, when I moved to D.C. for college. Those were the Bush years, so there was plenty to devour above the fold, but I was also an enthusiastic follower of its “Date Lab” column, which set up local singles, then documented their mating rituals. I also discovered two books by past staffers which vivisected the city and its powerful people: a collection of writings by Marjorie Williams, who had been a longtime Post columnist and reporter; and a memoir by the paper’s former owner and publisher, Katharine Graham. “Personal History” traced not just the rarified world of Georgetown social politics but a woman’s unlikely rise to the top of President Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Graham put her reputation and businesses on the line when she supported the Post’s journalism, as reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unfurled the story that would come to be known as the Watergate scandal. Now the paper that brought down Nixon is struggling to survive Donald Trump’s second term.

Graham’s personal convictions have sprung to mind in the course of the past few months, watching the Post’s current owner, Jeff Bezos, navigate his relationship with his newspaper and with the President. Just two weeks before the 2024 election, Bezos—who had harshly criticized Trump during the 2016 and 2020 elections—decided that the paper wouldn’t endorse a candidate, breaking with a decades-long tradition. “You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests,” he wrote at the time. “Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other.” This winter, he declared that the opinion pages would write only in support of “personal liberties and free markets,” another distinct shift. Many have interpreted these moves as those of a businessman looking to protect his financial interests during uncertain political times. But a fair number of the paper’s journalists find themselves disillusioned with an owner they once admired. Perhaps less understood is that the Post has been struggling financially for the past few years, and its staff have become increasingly frustrated by what many of them say is a lack of a clear business plan for one of America’s most storied newspapers. Staffers have been leaving the paper in droves because of their frustrations with the management that Bezos has put in charge. I set out to try to untangle what, exactly, is happening inside the Washington Post, where, as two former editors put it in an unacknowledged e-mail to Bezos, morale has “never been lower.”

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For more: read Isaac Chotiner’s interview with the Post’s former executive editor, Marty Baron, about his relationship with Bezos; and Charles Duhigg on how the Amazon billionaire mastered cutthroat capitalism.