During his tenure as owner, The Washington Post has been the scene of similar crimes, and in the few weeks leading up to the official announcement, there were signs of something big and bad on the horizon.
Still, for anyone who works in or cares about the news, the details are chilling. There is no schadenfreude here: Hundreds of excellent reporters are out of work because a billionaire didn’t like how his balance sheet looked.
Who knew it’s hard to make public-interest journalism profitable?
While we mourn this loss, it is important not to mythologise it. While it’s easy—and deserved—to vilify Bezos as the archetypal evil capitalist, it is important to understand him as an operator within a system that enables, if not encourages, his behaviour.
For anyone under 40, at least in the United States, there are no “good ol’ days” of journalism. Our lived experience is one of precarity, consolidation, and political and corporate influence.
I got my start when the internet, as we know it today, did exist. In the early 2000s, tech companies were building their data-driven empires by stealing copy, shredding business models, and creating an expectation that content could (and should) be free. Print media didn’t know what their websites were for, let alone how to monetise them.
While interning at The Boston Globe in 2006, a new rule came down: Reporters were to carry cameras, and photographers were to carry audio recorders. “Multimedia” was the new buzzword—code for more work for the same or less pay.
With Israel bombing Lebanon (again) and the US at the height of its post-9/11 military adventurism, The Boston Globe did then what Bezos did to The Washington Post this week: Axe its in-house international coverage. (The New York Times, which owned the Boston-area paper until 2013, did not want to cannibalise its own global coverage.)
That was before Twitter, the bots and influencers it spawned, and the global financial crisis, which hit everyone (except the financial and political elites responsible for it) hard.
My first interaction with The Washington Post was in 2004, attending a panel discussion about the news featuring two titans of an era of American journalism that is easy to be nostalgic about: Don Hewitt, the creator of the iconic CBS TV magazine 60 Minutes, and Ben Bradlee, best known for overseeing The Post’s legendary investigation of Watergate.
Both men are now dead.
It was a little more than a year after the US invasion of Iraq, and both The Washington Post and The New York Times had come out with their mea culpa for cheerleading the Bush Administration’s case for it. In that light, I figured my question to these two giants of journalism would be routine: Thanks for apologising, but what are you doing to fix it?
To my fresh-faced college freshman surprise, their response was defensive, dismissive, and coded in denial.
The experience, from more than 20 years ago, is critical for understanding this latest episode in the long-running soap opera about the demise of Anglo-American media. Yes, the Bezos cull has closed another window onto the world. But what view was that window giving us? Just how “international” was The Washington Post’s international coverage?
It has “Washington” in its name for a reason: If American troops aren’t shooting or getting shot at, or if the US president doesn’t have something to say about it, there is scant space for global stories.
I experienced this firsthand as a freelancer for The Post in Berlin. With the United States beset by the COVID-19 pandemic and the first Trump Administration’s poor handling of it, editors in London and DC had short attention spans for how things were faring in a place like Germany.
Coverage of the country’s general election, a consequential one to decide who would take over Angela Merkel’s long reign, was hastily planned. The headline of a profile I wrote about the incoming German health minister drew a comparison to Anthony Fauci—inaccurate, but American readers are lost without an American reference point.
I worked with smart and experienced journalists, but few of them knew German or understood the country. It rarely mattered.
Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the paper flew in one of its star reporters, on the security and intelligence beat, who insisted on a story about how German far-right activists were going to Ukraine to gain combat experience.
There was some truth to it, but the evidence was thin, so the article was padded out with speculation and shoehorned with unrelated examples from elsewhere. The dateline was Berlin, but it could just as easily have been Washington.
The parochial Americanisation of global events is not unique to The Washington Post. Most US media coverage of international news is little more than American news reported from elsewhere. From the average reader to the insider policymaker, the news diet on offer is a sugary one, rarely rising above the level of a middle school book report.
Perhaps that is the privilege of empire. When you’re the global rule-maker, you can decide the role you play in the story. For US media, that role is often benign, if not benevolent, with misdeeds framed as mere zig-zags on the inevitable path towards a more just—and American-led—future.
The framing isn’t political—coddling National Public Radio leans into it as much as chauvinist Fox—it’s systemic. It’s endemic to the American assumption that the world is made in its image, or should be. That common belief makes the walk between the Aaron Sorkin Liberal Imaginary and the MAGA one much shorter than many would like to think.
This has profound consequences for how the United States acts globally and, given the normative influence of American media on other cultures, how the rest of the world comes to see itself.
The violent shrinking of The Washington Post’s footprint need not be a curse, but a blessing in disguise. It’s a rare opportunity for media consumers everywhere to emancipate themselves from the hegemonic narratives told about them.
The Washington worldview is gone. Something better can take its place.
Photograph courtesy of Paul Keller. Published under a Creative Commons license.
