East West by Rampini: Bezos’ Washington Post and the American Journalism Crisis

The crisis of Washington Post it is the one that makes the most news, because it affects the capital’s newspaper, which occupies a special place in the Pantheon of the American press: for the role it played in bringing down the president Richard Nixon with the scandal of Watergate (1974). Furthermore its owner is Jeff Bezos of Amazonaccused of wanting to endear himself Donald Trumpsuspected of wanting to undermine opposition to the president by his journalists. But it is only the latest chapter in an older, broader decline with multiple causes.

At the beginning of February 2026 the Washington Post announced a drastic reduction in staff, equal to around a third of the overall workforce, with hundreds of cuts also in the editorial team. Affected areas included, among others, sports, books and some international coverageas part of a restructuring aimed at making the newspaper financially sustainable.

On the eve of the cuts, several journalists had publicly asked Jeff Bezos to intervene to stop or mitigate the staff reduction. The his silence he was perceived as significant, as the owner and ultimate decision maker of the company strategy.

The union that represents most of the employees of Post reported a progressive “emptying” of the newspaperarguing that the cuts would compromise the credibility and quality of information. Some union representatives have said that if Bezos no longer intends to invest in the newspaper’s mission, the Post it deserves another owner willing to do it.

Even the former director Martin Baron talked about one of the darkest moments in the history of the newspapercriticizing some recent choices made by the property, considered harmful to the brand and editorial identity.

But the great crisis of American journalism it had begun before Trump returned to the White House. Among the victims there were equally illustrious heads of the Washington Post.

In January 2024 the Los Angeles Times has cut at least 115 positions in the editorial teamover 20% of the journalistic workforce, compared to annual losses estimated between 30 and 40 million dollars. Until recently the editorial team had more than 500 journalists, but the collapse in advertising revenues and market difficulties forced a drastic reduction. And anyway the Los Angeles Times of January 2024 he had long since become a shadow of himself: until the 1990s, before the Internet appeared, it had been a giant that rivaled the New York Times for the network of correspondence offices abroad.

Il Boston Globe – made famous, among other things, for his investigative journalism that he had exposed to him pedophilia scandals in the local church – is often cited as one of the relatively more successful cases in the digital transition among large local newspapers. However, print circulation has fallen by over 50% compared to the pre-pandemic period. Growth in digital subscriptions, which initially offset some of the losses, has also slowed in recent years.

Il Chicago Tribuneanother newspaper with a (remote) glorious past, but ended up under the control of the Alden Global Capital fundhas become a symbol of criticism of the investment fund model accused of “squeezing” the editorial staff. During a strike in 2024 it was remembered that the editorial staff had dropped from over one hundred journalists to less than eighty in just a few years. Print circulation also continued to record double-digit declines.

The decline of San Francisco Chronicle dates back to the beginning of the millennium. It is no coincidence that, being in the capital of Silicon Valley and Big Tech, it was the first to suffer the shock of digital competition. In 2007 he announced a plan to cut 25% of editorial posts. In the following years, Hearst ownership repeatedly resorted to redundancy incentives to contain costs, in a context of declining revenues. Irony of history, the publishing group of San Francisco Chronicle had been founded by that William Randolph Hearstpress magnate at the beginning of the twentieth century, who had inspired the character of “Citizen Kane”, a cinematic masterpiece by Orson Welles (“Fourth Estate” in Italy).

Among the few publishers who today go against the grain, it should be noted Rupert Murdoch: He decided to expand his tabloid’s model New York Post in California, con the launch of a new magazine, the California Postin paper format and online. The initiative was presented as an attempt to exploit the spaces left free by the downsizing of traditional newsrooms in the State. The new newspaper adopts an aggressive and popular stylesimilar to that of New York Postand also focuses on a strong digital presence, with free online access, in contrast to the paid model of many competitors. In the big picture of a shrinking industry, Murdoch’s operation represents an isolated case of expansive investmentfounded on the idea that the crisis of traditional media opens up opportunities for different and more market-oriented editorial models. It also has a political color. Despite having had repeated clashes with Trump, he Post Murdoch’s is a right-wing newspaperat war against “woke” culture, and evidently thinks it has a market in the state of California which is the stronghold of the left.

Famous newspapers do not exhaust the picture. The local press landscape is particularly disastrous. Over the past 20 years, nearly 40% of US local newspapers have disappearedwith beyond 130 closures in the last year alone and large areas of the country that have become “information deserts,” where there is no reliable local news coverage. In the Wyoming eight newspapers were closed in one fell swoop, leaving entire communities without newspapers. Employment in U.S. newsrooms has declined dramatically over the past few decades. From 2005 to 2025, approximately 365,000 newspaper jobs disappeared, while circulation and revenue continued to decline. Job losses are not limited to print newspapers: digital sites and online publications have also resorted to cuts and reorganizations, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The structural factors underlying the decline are known and include: loss of advertising revenue in favor of digital platforms such as Google and Meta; reduction of traditional subscriptions; difficulty monetizing online content; redefining news consumptionwith the public increasingly moving towards social media and aggregators.

But there are also those who, from within the world of the media, invite journalists themselves toself-criticism, taking responsibility. An authoritative case is that of Gerard Bakera naturalized American Englishman, with a past as a major figure in British journalism (Bbc e Financial Times), then for years director of Wall Street Journalwhere he remains a columnist. Baker decided to publish a scathing indictment of the problems within the press that he believes contributed to the decline. The title of his editorial is provocative: «The greatest threat to journalism? Journalists.” Here are some excerpts.

«Don’t blame predatory owners for the loss of public trust. The fault lies with biased and incompetent information.

Is there a category of people with more boundless self-confidence or more atrophied self-awareness than American journalists?

“Democracy dies in darkness,” they tell us, implying that only the torch raised by courageous national media workers keeps the light of freedom burning in the twilight of an authoritarian era. It is true that, in the absence of independent and reliable sources, power is concentrated without accountability. But in this proclamation of one’s indispensability there is no mention of the role that journalists themselves have had in undermining public trust.

I don’t want to add here to the emotional elegies that are being written in the Washington Post after the latest round of downsizing last week. I have talented friends and former colleagues who are trying to revive the Postand I wish them every success. I won’t even join the complacency of some critics for the hundreds of people who have lost their jobs. Good people will be plunged into difficulty, at least for a while.

But I want to challenge the idea that it was heartless owners or cruel management that desecrated a national treasure. I also take issue with the broader lament that malevolent political and economic forces have fatally undermined the vitality of American journalism.

What happened to the Post This is, in part, what has happened to most mainstream news organizations over the past twenty years, with one or two notable exceptions: business models upset by the collapse of advertising, proliferation of alternative sources of information, growing specialization in public choices. The idea that the market still has room for dozens of large newspapers offering similar products “from A to Z” in an era of personalized tastes and atomized content is anachronistic.

But the most important factor is the role that journalists themselves have played in the collapse of news consumer confidence. Wherever these people gather (trust me, I have attended many of these therapy sessions), the wailing is loud and directed outward. They cry about the factors that they say led to their abandonment: social media “misinformation,” right-wing propagandists, Donald Trump.

They now warn that the downsizing of the Post and many other less famous sources represents a direct threat to our freedom, a further surrender by fearful leaders to Trump’s threat.

The president’s attacks on the media they are indefensible and worrying. But the main reason he gets away with it is that confidence in the honesty of these institutions had already been devastated by their own biased work. The list of recent media distortions, from the alleged Russiagate conspiracy to Black Lives Matter, is long. But therein the form of the most important prejudiceand more insidious because it is difficult to measure, does not concern what the news says. It’s about what they choose not to tell. Investigative journalism is vital, but for most journalists the people and institutions that need to be held accountable are only those who fit into their selective demonology: corporations and their executives, the wealthy, right-wing politicians. The unions? The bureaucracies? Academic institutions? Much less.

To give a current example of this selective narrative, consider how it has been treated recently immigration.

Like most people, I am horrified by some of the scenes seen on American streets over the past year. The media did well denounce the excesses of ICEand hats off if they helped force a change in tactics on the part of the Administration.

But how many newspapers, in the last ten years, have reported how mass immigration has affected American communities? How many did they cover the pressure placed on school and health service budgets? They’ve written a lot about the valuable contributions these migrants make to the U.S. economy, but how many have even considered the costs? Thousands of illegal immigrants are in jail or prison for crimes unrelated to their immigration status. How many newspapers have dedicated long articles to those crimes or their victims?

Before recent scenes of masked men dragging people out of cars in parking lots, Trump was doing unusually well among Latinos. When this data was reported in the newspapers, it was cited with a sort of dI perplexed disapprovalfew reporters have ever tried to understand what legal immigrants and their children think about the injustice ofmass illegal immigration.

Our media market is still vibrant, but largely polarized along partisan lines. Despite the hysteria, it is not dead or dying, but it has changed, in ways that make it more attuned to its audience and less effective as a tool of institutional accountability.

Just when America most needs a trustworthy press to expose the excesses of an out-of-control executive branch, its operatives have squandered the public trust.”