The email landed in Lizzie Johnson\u2019s in-tray in Ukraine just before 4pm local time. It came at a tough time for the reporter: Russia had been repeatedly striking the country\u2019s power grid, and just days before she had been forced to work out of her car without heat, power or running water, writing in pencil because pen ink freezes too readily.<\/p>\n
\u201cDifficult news,\u201d was the subject line. The body text said: \u201cYour position is eliminated as part of today\u2019s organizational changes,\u201d explaining that it was necessary to get rid of her to meet the \u201cevolving needs of our business\u201d.<\/p>\n
Johnson\u2019s response may go down in the annals of American media history. \u201cI was just laid off by The Washington Post<\/a> in the middle of a warzone,\u201d she wrote on X<\/a>. \u201cI have no words.\u201d<\/p>\n The Washington Post\u2019s Ukraine correspondent may have been rendered speechless over Wednesday\u2019s move by Jeff Bezos<\/a>, the Amazon billionaire and Post owner, to cut more than 300 newsroom jobs. The bloodletting, which has raised renewed fears about the resilience of America\u2019s democracy to withstand Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s attacks, swept away the paper\u2019s entire sports department, much of its culture and local staff and all of its journalists in such arid news zones as Ukraine and the Middle East.<\/p>\n Others, though, managed to find their tongues. \u201cIt\u2019s a bad day,\u201d said Don Graham<\/a>, son of the Post\u2019s legendary Watergate-era owner Katharine Graham, breaking the silence he has maintained since selling the paper to Bezos for $250m in 2013.<\/p>\n \u201cI am crushed,\u201d was the lament of Bob Woodward<\/a>, one-half of the paper\u2019s double act with Carl Bernstein that exposed Watergate<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThis ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world\u2019s greatest news organizations,\u201d said Marty Baron<\/a>, the Post\u2019s lionised former executive editor. Not one to mince his words, Baron castigated Bezos for his \u201csickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump\u201d, saying it left an especially \u201cugly stain\u201d on the paper\u2019s standing.<\/p>\n Several hundred people rallied in front of the Post\u2019s offices on Thursday, voicing support for their laid-off colleagues. \u201cIt\u2019s disappointing on an immense scale. They don\u2019t seem to give a damn about this institution and the people that make it run,\u201d said Patrick Nielsen, an engineer at the paper.<\/p>\n Howls of dismay were also uttered by prominent Post alumni in interviews with the Guardian. Robert McCartney, a 39-year veteran of the Post until he retired five years ago, said it was a \u201ctragedy and an outrage\u201d.<\/p>\n Like many Post insiders, McCartney has been astonished by the stark contrast between Bezos\u2019s handling of the newspaper during Donald Trump\u2019s first term in office and his conduct now in Trump 2.0.<\/p>\n McCartney was a senior journalist on the paper during Bezos\u2019s initial eight years of ownership, through Trump\u2019s first presidency. Back then, he, like many others, was grateful for Bezos\u2019s tutelage.<\/p>\n \u201cWe saw him as a savior. He pumped money into the Post, didn\u2019t meddle in the newsroom and stood up to Trump,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Fast-forward to 2026, and a very different Bezos has emerged. In 2017, soon after Trump\u2019s first inauguration, the Post introduced its new strapline: \u201cDemocracy dies in darkness.\u201d<\/p>\n That wording still runs proudly beneath the masthead<\/a>. At the end of a week like this one, though, America looks a notable shade darker.<\/p>\n Marcus Brauchli, the Post\u2019s executive editor until 2012 who now runs investment firm North Base Media, said that this was a terrible moment to be hammering one of the country\u2019s great custodians of public accountability: \u201cThese are historic times, given the cyclone bearing down on the world order and American system of government. This is when journalism matters most. I mean, laying off reporters in Ukraine, now.\u201d<\/p>\n It is not as though Bezos needs the money. He is the fourth-richest person on the planet, according to Forbes<\/a>, with a $245bn fortune.<\/p>\n As Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, pointed out<\/a>, Bezos could cover five years of the Post\u2019s $100m annual losses by dipping into his earnings from a single week.<\/p>\n The optics of Wednesday\u2019s train wreck of an announcement were also diabolical: the job of facing the distraught staff on Zoom was delegated to the Post\u2019s beleaguered current executive editor, Matt Murray.<\/p>\n Bezos was nowhere to be seen. Yet there he was, earlier in the week, beaming broadly<\/a> as he welcomed Trump\u2019s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth<\/a>, to the Florida headquarters of his space company, Blue Origin.<\/p>\n Nor did Will Lewis, Bezos\u2019s consigliere as publisher of the Post, have the courage to present himself as the guillotine came down. A day after he had presided over the evisceration of the paper\u2019s sports department, he was spotted<\/a> attending the red carpet at an NFL Super Bowl event in San Francisco.<\/p>\n On Saturday night, however, Lewis abruptly resigned<\/a>, acknowledging \u201cdifficult decisions\u201d as he praised Bezos\u2019s leadership of the paper.<\/p>\n The lay-offs came just five days after the launch of the first lady documentary, Melania<\/a>, bankrolled by Amazon MGM Studios. Bezos sank $75m into that pile of \u201cgilded trash<\/a>\u201d yet, unlike the Post, seems unfazed by the film\u2019s paltry return on investment.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat Bezos did for Melania while gutting his own newspaper,\u201d wrote the historian Simon Schama<\/a>, will come to be seen \u201cas the most glaring symptom of cultural collapse in a democracy hanging on to truth by the barest of threads\u201d.<\/p>\n This fateful juncture has been looming for a while. The first warning signs came in October 2024, when Bezos yanked the Post\u2019s planned endorsement<\/a> of Trump\u2019s Democratic rival Kamala Harris just 11 days before the presidential election.<\/p>\n A wave of public revulsion ensued, leading to the cancellation of at least 250,000 Post subscriptions.<\/p>\n Soon after, the billionaire unilaterally imposed new strictures on the paper\u2019s opinion content. He introduced what he called his \u201ctwo pillars\u201d: \u201cpersonal liberties and free markets.\u201d<\/p>\n That drove many of the paper\u2019s top commentators rushing for the exit, among them the economics columnist Eduardo Porter<\/a>, who now writes for the Guardian. \u201cThis layering of dogma undermined critical thinking,\u201d Porter recalled. \u201cIt turned the Post into something more akin to a church, with tight constraints on thought.\u201d<\/p>\n This week\u2019s day of the long knives has left many people desperately seeking explanations. There were clearly business motives at play: you don\u2019t get to be a gazillionaire like Bezos without caring about profit lines, and the Post has been battered in recent years by harsh industry headwinds.<\/p>\n But there are other, more sinister, interpretations. McCartney thinks back to 2019 when Amazon lost a $10bn Pentagon cloud-computing contract during Trump\u2019s first term.<\/p>\n Amazon complained in a lawsuit<\/a> that this was a blatant act of retaliation by Trump, punishing Bezos for the Washington Post\u2019s piercing coverage of his administration. Could it be that the bruising experience led Bezos to change tack, concluding that shining a light in defense of American democracy came at too high a price for the jewels in his business empire, Amazon and Blue Origin?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very likely that the desire to appease Trump, to placate him, is playing a role in these decisions,\u201d McCartney said.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a chilling thought for such a beacon of accountability journalism as the Washington Post<\/a>. And it is set against the already parlous state of US media.<\/p>\n Since 2000, some 3,500 newspapers have closed shop<\/a>, abandoning one in four Americans who now live in news deserts with no local newspaper. The most recent casualty was the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette<\/a>, which will publish its final edition in May. It was founded in 1786, three years before George Washington donned the mantle of first president.<\/p>\n While many papers have been folding, others have fallen into the hands of a new breed of super-wealthy tech and venture capitalist owners who, like Bezos, see journalism as an asset to monetize: the Los Angeles Times was acquired in 2018 by a biotech billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiong.<\/p>\n Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong has displayed symptoms of Trump Appeasement Syndrome. He too refused to allow<\/a> his paper to endorse Harris days before the 2024 election.<\/p>\n Historic newspapers brought low, news deserts proliferating: this is fertile ground on which misinformation and the Maga pestilence can grow. Trump has cultivated it relentlessly to his advantage.<\/p>\n Long hostile towards what he calls the \u201cfake news media\u201d, Trump has taken his vendetta against truth-seekers to a new level. He has stripped public media<\/a> channels NPR and PBS of more than $1bn in federal funding, launched full-frontal attacks on individual journalists and outlets exposing his corruption and lies and sustained a bullying campaign against corporate owners designed to browbeat them into subservience.<\/p>\n CBS News is the consummate example. Trump leaned on Paramount, which owned the news network, with a $10bn lawsuit over a 60 Minutes pre-election interview with Harris. Paramount settled for $16m<\/a>, even though the suit was widely ridiculed as spurious.<\/p>\n Front of Paramount\u2019s mind, no doubt, was its upcoming merger with Skydance Media that required federal \u2013 ie Trump\u2019s \u2013 approval.<\/p>\n Following the merger, David Ellison became CEO of Paramount Skydance. He is son of the billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is a close friend and adviser of Trump\u2019s.<\/p>\n The younger Ellison went ahead and appointed the anti-woke commentator Bari Weiss<\/a> as editor in chief of CBS News, sending shockwaves through the storied network\u2019s dazed and demoralised<\/a> staff. Weiss, who came to the job with no TV industry experience, has swiftly confirmed their fears.<\/p>\n She pulled a 60 Minutes segment<\/a> on the notorious Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador to which the Trump administration had been deporting immigrants. Among her early hires<\/a> as CBS News contributors are a Trump loyalist and former US marine, a prominent vaccine skeptic buddy of the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, and fellow anti-woke firebrand Niall Ferguson.<\/p>\n The cumulative malaise that is descending over US media leaves the country\u2019s democratic institutions vulnerable to attack. It can\u2019t be exclusively blamed for Trump\u2019s excesses.<\/p>\n There are plenty of other willing accomplices and capitulators, including universities like Columbia<\/a>, corporate law firms<\/a> and the gung-ho conservative activists who now control the supreme court<\/a>.<\/p>\n But from Trump\u2019s perspective, a media on its knees surely helps. The results are present everywhere you look.<\/p>\n Trump is unleashed, unchained. He feels so comfortable in his regal skin that he can berate a respected female CNN reporter questioning him on the Epstein files for never smiling<\/a>.<\/p>\n He can peddle unashamedly in racism, posting a video<\/a> depicting the first Black president and his first lady as monkeys.<\/p>\n He can send a masked paramilitary<\/a> into the streets of Minneapolis, resulting in Americans getting killed<\/a> for exercising their first amendment rights. And when the polls for November\u2019s midterm elections look challenging for him, he can prepare for another blitzkrieg<\/a> on the very foundations of American democracy: the ballot box.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a paradox in all this. Many of the democratic norms that Trump is obliterating \u2013 take for example his destruction of the norm of Department of Justice independence in his persecution of his political opponents \u2013 were laid down in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the same Watergate scandal that was brought into the light by that pair of courageous reporters at a newspaper called the Washington Post.<\/p>\n