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While Washington Post employees remain in the dark about an impending round of cuts that could dramatically reshape the publication, the man that many hoped could soften or stop the blow, owner Jeff Bezos, has remained silent.
So far, three staff-organized letters sent by Post employees to Bezos imploring him to protect the Post’s robust coverage have gone unanswered.
The first plea went to Bezos on 25 January, when about 60 people signed a letter asking him to protect the company’s foreign news operation, which is rumored to be a major target of cost-cutting.
Two days later, employees sent Bezos a letter asking him to preserve the newspaper’s local coverage, which is also said to be at risk for heavy cuts.
“Should you allow Post management to lay off the local staff, which has been cut in half in the last five years, the effect on this region and the people in it will be immeasurable,” the staffers wrote. “We care deeply about the DC area, and we know you do, too.”
At the end of last week, the publication’s White House reporters sent a letter to Bezos urging him to avoid cutting coverage areas central to its readership. Post staffers have also filmed and posted videos on social media urging Bezos to “#savethepost”.
While Post chief executive Will Lewis has been included on at least one of the emails, the letters have been addressed to Bezos, who some staffers hope might be more persuadable. (Matt Murray, the Post’s top editor, has had private discussions with several Post journalists in recent weeks, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.)
“As the Post’s [owner], Bezos is ultimately making the call on these cuts,” said a Post staffer who signed one of the letters but was not authorized to comment. “He also has enough money to do whatever he chooses here. Reporters across the newsroom want to be sure he understands the magnitude of the devastating cuts that we all expect are coming.”
Emails sent by the Guardian to Bezos and a representative at the company he founded, Amazon, have not been returned. A Post spokesperson declined to comment on the rumored cuts.
The Post staffer described the mood at the paper as “funereal”, with many expecting the cuts to come in the next few days – though the publication still has not acknowledged or confirmed that anything is happening. A rally to protest the cuts has been scheduled for outside the Post’s headquarters on Thursday.
On Monday, the union representing most Post employees called out Bezos in a series of posts on Twitter/X. “If @JeffBezos follows through with his reported plan to decimate the Post’s newsroom, it will be a huge indictment of his supposed business prowess,” the account wrote. “How else to explain his failure to monetize some of the world’s most award-winning, agenda-setting journalism?”
Some Post staffers also noted that Bezos has not yet commented on the 14 January raid of a Post reporter’s home, even though many groups that advocate for journalists decried the government’s tactics as unprecedented and dangerous. Cameron Barr, a former managing editor of the Post, called out Bezos for his silence in a post on LinkedIn, writing: “It’s not just the chest-thumping overreach of the Trump administration that will crush American freedoms – it’s the silence of its enablers.”
Amazon and Bezos have also faced criticism for spending approximately $75m to acquire and promote a documentary about Melania Trump – particularly after Bezos faced accusations of cozying up to Trump by killing the Post’s planned endorsement last fall of Kamala Harris for president.
Glenn Kessler, who ended a 27-year-long career at the Post last year, expressed cautious optimism about the campaign to reach Bezos. “That kind of pushback might have an impact,” he said. “We don’t really know until we see what the actual result is.”
Kessler said he and a few other reporters had lunch with Bezos, who purchased the paper in 2013, after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. “He wanted to hear war stories and that sort of thing,” he recalled. “He was quite interested in what people did. He had this great laugh, and he seemed quite engaged.”
But Kessler was heavily critical of Bezos’s handling of the Harris endorsement and his decision to refocus the section’s opinion page to prioritize writing “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”, decisions that led to the resignation of a top editor and quickly cost the Post hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
“Even before these cuts, you can question the quality of Bezos’s stewardship,” Kessler said. “The sense I get is that he’s not nearly as engaged with the Post as he once was. If you’re not really that engaged or invested in the thing that you own, the easiest thing to do is to cut back the money you’re losing on it.”
“I think it’s hard to overestimate how excited the journalists and editors were when Bezos bought the company,” recalled political journalist Chris Cillizza, who worked at the Post from 2006 to 2017. “The richest man in the world buys the company and he says all the right things. I think people were slower to see that something had changed because they wanted to believe so badly that the original sense we had of Bezos was it.”
Cillizza remembered being skeptical when Bezos said he intended the Post to be profitable. “I remember thinking to myself even then, in 2013: ‘Man, that’s going to be tough.’”
While Bezos has stayed silent about potential cuts to the Post, and ignored an effort by the union last year to get him to visit the newspaper, he was more visibly engaged with one of his other companies on Monday, the spaceflight startup Blue Origin.
Bezos was on hand to meet secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, who last November called the Post’s reporting “fake news”, during a visit to the company’s facility in Florida. “Great to see you,” Bezos told Hegseth. “Welcome – it’s an honor to have you.”
